Online Communities to Support Student Wellbeing

Cornell University does not require faculty to report a mid-term grade. For Ann LaFave, Senior Director of Student Services at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), that used to mean that in the waning days of every semester, her office would be visited by distraught students who had just figured out that their grade for a certain class would be much lower than they’d hoped for. Some would need a miracle to even pass. Tears were common.

“They were literally crying in the lobby,” LaFave recalls. “I thought, we have to do something about this. Students should not be this distressed by the end of a semester.”

She found a solution in Salesforce.org’s Education Cloud, the leading constituent relationship management (CRM) platform for higher education. Education Cloud can be accessed through Canvas, the university’s learning platform, making it easy for professors to notify advising offices of students who might be struggling, without changing their curricula. These alerts generate automated messages to the student with details about available resources, and open a case file that captures all communications, appointments and other data so that no one slips through the cracks.

“It gives students more time to think about their options,” LaFave explains. “And we can show them data, like the percentage of students who went on to pass after receiving an alert in that course. We can give them more information to work with.”

That’s just one example of how Cornell has used Education Cloud to support student wellbeing, before and during the pandemic. CALS and other departments within the university have continued to build on the platform’s capacity for presenting information and resources in an intuitive, responsive, community-based setting.

In a recent higher education trends survey conducted by Salesforce.org, students indicated that online communities were vital to helping them adapt to the realities of the pandemic. More than 30 percent of students said they felt more connected to their peers, instructors and advisers this year, and less than 25 percent felt less connected. Additionally, nearly 30 percent said that online communities created a sense of belonging to their institution during this time, and 25 percent said that online communities supported their wellbeing. More than three-quarters said that receiving personalized messages reassured them that their schools still cared about their success. Among those who transferred to a different institution this year, 25 percent cited dissatisfaction with the previous school’s responses to the pandemic.

Prior to adopting Education Cloud, the CALS on-boarding process was information-heavy and lacking in personal engagement. Students received emails from various disconnected Cornell offices over the course of a summer and were told to reach out if they had questions. There was no single, reliable method for faculty and staff to connect with students on important questions about arriving on campus, registering for classes, and meeting with advisors.

Cornell built an online community powered by Salesforce, called Cornell Chatter, where students can engage with peers, faculty and staff, and join sub-groups related to their status (new or transferring) and major. They can access extensive online libraries of orientation information and post specific questions for input from the larger community. These tools soon cut the volume of phone calls to the Student Services office by half, leaving more time for staff to help those students who really needed it. The technology is not replacing one-on-one interaction, but facilitating it.

A campus-wide review of mental health services revealed frustration with the processes for taking a health leave of absence. The process was decentralized, and students bore much of the burden of navigating the system. The university addressed this by streamlining the processes for leaving and returning and bringing them to Cornell Chatter.

“When students aren’t well, whatever that illness might be, the last thing you want is for them to have to jump through hoops,” says LaFave. “And sometimes, we’re discovering, students may actually not need a full health leave, maybe they need an accommodation. If so, we can get that student plugged into the Student Disability Services Office to learn about options that might help them stay on campus.”

Cornell Chatter now also offers a Study Space App built on Salesforce, through which students can reserve safe, socially distanced places to study on campus. The Cornell Daily Sun reported recently on how important this has been for students especially during this time. One said: “It’s just for my own sanity at this point. I just need to get out and change the scenery a little bit.”

“Without these tools, I’m not sure how we could support students during this pandemic,” says LaFave. Even after several years of using Education Cloud, she remains impressed with how seamlessly the platform integrates with the mission and goals of higher education institutions.

“No major company would have high-paying customers — more than 20,000 of them, in our case — without knowing things about them,” she explains. “Students aren’t just customers, of course, but we can use the same tools to serve them. We need to know more about our students, we need to reach them where they are, and get them the information they need when they need it, not just dump it on a web site and hope they see it. Cornell is a big place. Whatever we can do to make it feel a little smaller and available to students, that’s what we have to do.”