Helping Pathways students thrive through Student Support Initiative Customer Service Management
The Student Support Initiative’s (SSI) Customer Service Team is partnering with IT Services to enhance parent and student support for Northeastern University’s Pathway programs. The project to leverage ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management (CSM) and 3C Logic integration recently kicked off and is expected to increase student satisfaction within the global university. This solution, which is expected to be in place by the start of the 2023-24 academic year, will increase student success through self-service options and will leverage connections with campus partners already using ServiceNow and 3C Logic. The Office of Global Services has already moved to this solution, fielding 84,517 cases in 2022, and SSI’s transition will only continue to improve and streamline the global student experience.
Oakland IT team’s visit to Boston supports further integration of and collaboration among global campuses
The week of April 10, several Oakland IT managers, alongside AVP of Global IT Operations Matt Meyer, paid their first visit to the Boston campus since Northeastern’s merger with Mills College. The Oakland staff spent the trip shadowing their respective parts of the IT operation, including customer experience at the Tech Bar inside Snell Library and classroom AV support. The group also participated in hands-on training and other sessions at the new IT Training Lab at ITS HQ and collaborated with Boston-based colleagues from both inside and outside IT on strategic planning. The team is taking this first-hand, critical knowledge back home with them to share with the rest of their staff and to help support the future growth and vision for Northeastern’s Oakland campus and the global, digital university.
Upgraded printing in Snell Library provides more printing options and faster service for students
The two highest utilized printers on the Boston campus, located on the first floor of Snell Library, have been replaced with new color multi-function printers. The new printers, which are faster and bring color printing options and the large format tabloid paper size, provide students even more places on the Boston campus to print specialty jobs. Additionally, these two new printers further standardize the ITS global student printer fleet by bringing greater parity of print options across campus print locations, which in turn provides a better and simpler experience for students. In the first four days of service, the new printers were used to print over 10,000 pages. The previous black and white printers printed 3.5 million pages in their three-year lifecycle.
New myNortheastern landing page speeds connection to key resources for the community
Members of the Northeastern community that visit my.northeastern.edu are now greeted by an audience-driven landing page in advance of login that presents clearer defined pathways for students, employees, and parents to access primary university applications. The landing page reduces the number of clicks and time needed to access desired information and web experiences. This change was made as a precursor to the retirement of myNortheastern anticipated for later this year and follows the recent expansion of the global digital platform to now include the Employee Hub. On the new landing page, employees are encouraged to transition to the Employee Hub, while retaining the ability to access the myNortheastern pathway until June 1. The parent pathways are the most notable, as family members can now elect to bypass myNortheastern altogether and log in quickly and directly to the highly popular Family Self-Service Portal.
Updated digital experience helps prospective N.U.in students and parents navigate program pathways
Following a recent update to the N.U.in website, prospective N.U.in students and their parents can now explore program locations and curriculum through a more accessible and significantly streamlined experience. The updated website enables site visitors to easily and quickly filter program locations by College and, within locations, filter courses by NU Path and/or Major requirements, all within just a few clicks. Previously, students and parents had to navigate through multiple links and secondary web pages, as well as more than 400 PDF documents, to explore program locations and courses. This enhancement is the result of a close partnership between IT Services and Enrollment Management team members which provided upskilling opportunities across the teams and enabled a solution to be devised that did not require the implementation of any new system or integration infrastructure.
Partnership with Marketing amplifies Northeastern’s brand and impact through two key website redesigns
External Affairs’ Marketing and IT Services’ Web Solutions teams joined together to update information and user experience on two highly visible university websites under tight timelines. The two teams iterated between design and development to quickly re-imagine the digital front doors of Northeastern’s Research and Academic Honors websites. The new digital experience for the Academic Honors site now better reflects the university’s global impact, while celebrating Northeastern community members and their respective impacts and accomplishments. Similarly, Northeastern’s Research site now highlights the research themes of health, security, and sustainability, which powers the institution’s research enterprise and researchers.
Traditional bubble sheet exam grading transformed, reducing faculty wait times and enabling service at other global campuses
A new scanning solution for traditional bubble sheet exams, an exam format still particularly useful for large classes with unique security needs, was introduced as part of the ongoing digital transformation of teaching and learning technologies. Papercut’s Scan-to-Cloud functionality allows for faculty to self-scan exam sheets to Gradescope, a popular cloud-based grading tool that has delivered over 9,400 assignments and 981,039 student submissions in over 1,100 courses at Northeastern since fall 2021. The new scanning solution reduces the dependency on Boston-based ITS staff and decreases wait times for faculty. Documentation and consultations with the Academic Technologies team have been offered to further help faculty adopt this more streamlined, cloud-based scanning solution.