Reflection and Review of Resource for Virtual Student Engagement

As COVID-19 is still impacting the delivery of the college experience, many campuses are beginning to imagine what a full semester could look like at least partially virtually. While curricular courses have managed to figure out online learning with years of academic research on the topic, ample tools and platforms, and entire offices dedicated to the topic, student affairs has had to adapt as they go. Never before have we seen a demand to transition student support services online in a prolonged, sustainable way. For example, many brilliant leaders at Florida State developed "Virtual FSU". This one website is a catch all for the work done by 12 departments and over 1,000 employees daily. This website evolves daily as the Division leaders to adapt to the information they are given from FSU leadership and feedback from students on what they need. As someone who sits between academic affairs and student affairs, I continue to reflect on the need for scholarship to be done on virtual student co-curricular engagement and online student engagement with resources.

One scholar who has been doing this work on digital identity development of college students in Dr. Josie Ahlquist (who is also an FSU adjunct faculty member). Her dissertation crafted these 6 pillars of digital development: digital identity, digital wellness, digital decision making, digital branding, digital community building, and digital leadership. One of her blog posts that seemed particularly important during this time is Advanced Social Media Strategies for Student Affairs (written pre-COVID). In this post, Dr. Ahlquist lays out 5 suggestions for student affairs professionals to implement that also engage students:

1. Find and Activate your Student Influencers
2. Be Digital Historians
3. Live stream, video production & Instagram stories
4. Evaluate & Analyze Pages
5. Audit, Reorganize and/or Centralize Your Pages

Recommendations 4 and 5 talk about using data and analytics from these platforms to better utilize them, similar to our discussion this week and upcoming project on tracking. She recommends ways to use that data to improve student affairs social media presence and important next considerations.

If you have interest in this topic, I posted some resources including one of her podcast episodes on our Mendeley page. Her website is https://www.josieahlquist.com/. 

Comments

  1. Jodie DoodleJune 22, 2020 at 1:11 AM

    You pointed out that the Advanced Social Media Strategies for Student Affairs was written pre-COVID, this is a perfect example of how we as a society were already on a track to a more digital life, COVID has simply forced us to progress faster.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. BDeviesJune 28, 2020 at 3:55 PM

      I agree! A lot of the problems in implementing good online curriculums are likely things we should have already been practicing!

      Delete

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