Paritii | Advising Technology Use Cases

Case Study

Advising Technology Use Cases

‍With the move to Holistic Advising comes even more fragmentation of technology products that help students along their journey. To better understand how technology can enable student success, we interviewed a diverse set of students and advisors to prioritize their use cases and advise institutions on creating a technology procurement roadmap for Advising Software.

Problem

Advising technology comprises a suite of student support systems used by institutions and their advisors to understand a student holistically and track their progress toward a degree. This ecosystem includes, but is not limited to Student Information Systems, Learning Management Systems, CRMs, Degree Tracking, Case Management Communication, and other tools that provide information from, to, and about students within an institution.

Although the outcomes desired by students and advisors can be engendered by technology, the features can live in disparate software in different departments. Institutions procure software to help their Advising process, but needed some help identifying which features to prioritize first.

Solution

As part of our research into defining successful Advising, we created a Theory of Change document to outline the behavioral shifts that need to happen in the current student journey, prioritized by the most important use cases students identified. We then overlayed the relevant technological features that best enable these shifts to create a heat map that helps institutions prioritize software purchases.

Example shift:

FROM: Students take ad hoc classes that are available without a long-term plan in mind

TO: Students can map out a degree path and understand which classes they need to take and when to stay on track

FEATURE: Degree Tracking/Auditing Software

PRIORITY: HIGHEST

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Impact

The purpose of the map is to outline the human-centered use cases that surfaced from deep research with Black, LatinX, Indigenous, and Low-Income (BLI/LI) students and their advisors on how technology can enable successful student outcomes at Post-Secondary Institutions.

This map helps institutions

a. understand which software features enable successful advising based on the uniquely identified needs of BLI/LI students,

b. inform their software procurement processes and technology roadmaps

c. Influence providers of advising software to build equitable and useful capabilities that augment institutions' advising processes.

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