We are beyond grateful to each of our donors for helping us surpass our goals and further the mission of Retriever Essentials here at UMBC! Thank you so much! Our work would not be possible without you!
Mathematics is a powerful tool. We use applications from math all day, every day, like when we drive over a bridge or look at our email.
Math is very difficult for many people, and they struggle with it. Many students at our university (and almost all others) need to repeat a math class to progress in their program and complete their degrees.
Our research has uncovered some important facts:
Many students repeating math classes often must do so more than one time, which extends their time to degree and could prevent them from graduating.
Students who use the Math and Science Tutoring Center improve their chances of passing their math courses.
The positive effect from math tutoring is especially large for students who are repeating a course. “Repeaters” increase their chances of success by roughly 15 to 20 percentage points!
But, we found, only about 10 percent of students repeating math were going to tutoring
The Data Science Team, supported by DoIT and the Provost's Office, designed a pilot program in conjunction with the Math Department to “nudge” students repeating 100-level math courses to use tutoring.
A nudge is a message designed to provide information to many people at very low cost that changes behavior over time. An example of a nudge you see in everyday life is the roadside sign that says “Click it or ticket.” Our nudges let students know not just that tutoring is effective, but also how effective it is.
This semester (Spring 2021) we sent nudges to 114 students using a myUMBC personal post. About 70 percent of students receiving the nudge read them, and we have evidence that suggests that the nudge leads to an increased use of math tutoring by roughly 30 percent.
The pilot is now in its 8th semester. During that time we’ve nudged over 1800 students repeating their courses.
In addition to this program, we’re using what we’ve learned about nudges to help students in other ways that support their success, including combining them with predictive analytics for enhanced early alerts.
By Bob Carpenter
Early next week, the week of 3/8/21, the Webex app, formerly Webex Teams, will receive an upgrade enabling all features contained in the Webex meetings app. This change makes for a more simple user experience and means that many campus users will no longer need to run a second Webex Meetings software.
For the last year much of the campus community has needed to run both the Webex Meetings and the Webex (Teams) software in order to have complete functionality for calling, asynchronous communication and in-meeting experiences. In the next week Webex users will be able to upgrade their Webex application to include all in-meeting features previously available only in the Webex Meetings software. This includes in-meeting chat, breakout rooms, emojis, grid views and more.
located on the left panel of the software. In this second of a series of updates we’ll give a brief description of Salesforce, UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.
Salesforce is a market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. In higher education, CRMs are used in recruitment, admissions, student success, and alumni relations. Salesforce is an important tool to help us maintain and grow our enrollment...vital to UMBC’s ability to weather the pandemic and our long term response to changing age-based demographics in our region.
Big news! Salesforce will launch on March 3rd. “Launch” means that all prospective undergraduate student communications and their activities will be collected, analyzed, and maintained in Salesforce making it the system of record for prospective student data.
The next phase of the project is integrating prospective students’ requests for information, built and tested by our team, into the platform. Marketing Cloud, a companion product to Salesforce, uses information from these requests from potential students with a personalized journey (experience) and helps admissions staff identify what information might be of most use to them.
At the same time the team is finalizing the launch, we’re also conducting training and activities to maximize the value of our investment and taking important steps to extend the platforms to the Graduate School and Division of Professional Studies.
This is a big project with many interconnected tasks. Congratulations to the cross-campus team that has accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time.
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