Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Russell Moore
The feedback from students is clear: CU Boulder can do a better job of providing a seamless experience for students. When talking about accessing services and completing what should be simple university business transactions, students are often frustrated by different logins to different systems and disconnected sources of important information.
With this in mind, we are excited to announce an effort to create a more unified online and in-person experience for students, which we are calling the Unified Student Experience Project. The goal of this initiative is to unify access to online and in-person student services and business transactions, supported by policy, guidelines, governance and comprehensive student success resources that will transform today’s fragmented digital and in-person student support landscape.
While our many campus departments excel at offering individual solutions that put students first, design of those solutions is often optimized for a specific task and not for a more holistic and unified overall student experience. The result is a disjointed set of tools, policies and practices that makes it difficult for students to navigate.
Not only should we strive to make things easier for students with the specific transactional and business experiences that we oversee, but we should also do so in the context of the overall student experience. If we are successful, our work will help students focus more on academics and student life and less on navigating institutional bureaucracy.
Senior Vice Chancellor and Chief Financial Officer Kelly Fox
The project team is composed of approximately 75 administrative and academic staff, faculty and students. The team is seeking broad input and engagement from across campus to better understand our existing digital landscape and varied needs prior to creating a vision for a more unified experience.
This initiative will likely mean changes to processes, policies and approaches for engaging with students. Some of these changes will be challenging. But the end result, creating a simpler, more intuitive user experience for our students, as well as more consistent processes for our service providers, is something we need to achieve.
The project team will involve the larger campus community early in the process to ensure inclusivity, positive impact and long-term success for the initiative. The focus of the project is the broad-based tools and transactional systems that support the success and positive growth of all of our students. It will not address departmental webpages, faculty course websites or anything else that will impact faculty’s individual autonomy to conduct their work.
Periodic updates on the progress of the initiative will be shared in CU Boulder Today, and specific individuals may be asked to attend meetings and assist in helping the project succeed. You can also stay informed about the progress of this initiative and contribute feedback through the Unified Student Experience Project website, where you can find the team members, view the project timeline and request more information.
We thank you for your support with this initiative.
With regard,
Russ Moore,
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Kelly Fox,
Senior Vice Chancellor and Chief Financial Officer
