An important goal for the Office of Academic Advising and Success Coaching is establishing and maintaining a mutually supportive and edifying relationship with our faculty and staff partners in other colleges and departments at Loyola. We want to work together to promote the learning outcomes for academic advising and success coaching, and to engage in continuing education in best practices and current research in student support.
The student learning outcomes of academic advising and success coaching are guided by Loyola's mission, goals, curriculum and co-curriculum. These outcomes articulate what students will demonstrate, know, value, and do as a result of participating in academic advising and success coaching. You can read more about our approach on the "About" page on the banner above.
On the pages for our service areas, you'll find more information about our approaches to advising and coaching, along with Student Learning Outcomes and additional resources and training opportunities.
Below you'll find information about the technologies we use to contact students, and to record our meetings, track trends, and export data.
Technologies Used by the Office of Academic Advising and Success Coaching:
(1) Mongoose (text messaging): Having access to multiple tools for communicating with students has become important. Our current context, in particular, has inspired us to think of new and useful ways to stay in touch with students, beyond our old reliance on email and walk-in availability. We have successfully turned to text messaging, using an application called Mongoose.
You can use Mongoose through your computer (like email) or link it through your cell phone (it does not message students using your personal cell phone number). We recommend using text messaging sparingly, usually as a quick check-in with students you haven't heard from in a while, or as a reminder to them about an important message they received from you or the university through their email.
You can find a user guide for Mongoose created by our advisor-coach, Nydia Araya, here. You can also access a condensed training powerpoint presentation by the support services of Mongoose here. There will be opportunities in the Fall semester (2020) to connect with our team about using Mongoose. So stay tuned!
(2) Loynotes (note-taking, referrals, and emailing):
Our office uses Loynotes to record meetings with students, to track emails to students, to make referrals about students of concern, and to export data and trends on the number and types of meetings we've had each semester and at the end of each academic year.
For those members of the faculty and staff who have worked with the Online Program, you probably have some familiarity with this system already.
While using Loynotes is not a requirement for academic advising, it certainly helps to make the process more efficient. Recording and sharing notes about students in this system creates a permanent record that stays with the student, even as faculty and staff members connected with students change. It can also provide useful reminders of previous meetings - sometimes held quite long ago - that can make meetings feel more familiar and more effective. For your advisees, the system displays demographic and academic information - such as current schedules, GPA, standardized test scores, etc. - that are normally available through multiple programs like LORA and SIS that, as we all know, can sometimes be tricky to access and use.
There are a number of ways to use this helpful resource, and we created (in Spring 2020) an introductory video that highlights some of its features. You can find a link to that video here. We will provide opportunities for training, as well as discussion of associated issues such as FERPA and ADA rules for sharing notes about students and reccomendations in note-taking techniques, in the Fall (2020).