Hi, I’m Kristina Bartold. I’m the Residence and Student Life Coordinator at St. Jerome’s University in Ontario, Canada.
I wake up excited every morning to go to work at SJU alongside my team of passionate colleagues. We’re honoured to support our forward-thinking community of students by providing opportunities for them to take advantage of our institution and to contribute to their personal and professional development.
Finding a student engagement platform
Last year, it became clear that we needed to adopt a student engagement platform. We wanted to better encapsulate our student experience.
We needed to identify a partner who could address the varied needs of our students, administrators, and of our institution as a whole - in short, we needed to translate our student experience into an interactive app. We talked to partner after partner, we learned about analytics, student apps, event management capabilities, attendance tracking, etc. - and we especially sought out platforms that could help us implement things we had only been able to dream about like building a Co-Curricular Record.
All of our research, discussion, and learning pointed us to one partner: Involvio. We selected Involvio and worked closely with their team to launch a student engagement platform on our campus that includes what’s become the first mobile Co-Curricular Record in the world. Today, Involvio allows us to provide a more integrated and accessible experience for our students, and helps us to think about the kinds of data we need to be leveraging as we continue to build out our programs.
Sharing our learnings
Throughout the last year, I’ve developed a close relationship with Involvio through working together. I’ve been able to get a sense for just how passionate Involvio is about enhancing the student experience and improving outcomes - that’s why I was so thrilled when they asked if I would help coordinate contributions from the broader community to this blog focused on student engagement, retention, technology, mobile, and student affairs.
I hope you’ll considering contributing your thoughts about the areas surrounding the student experience to this blog, and I hope you’ll follow along too! I’m excited to learn from leaders in our field on topics that will inform our profession’s day-to-day work and our long term objectives. We know that technology’s role is only growing in importance, and our students are demanding that we keep up with our mobile world more than ever before.
Want to contribute a piece to this blog? Click here!
