Stakeholder attendees  participating in the NOVA/Mason Walk.

The Seamless Transfer Pathways team has been on the road, visiting each of the campus pairs in the project, since the end of January. In total, almost 250 faculty, staff, and students got to experience the human-centered research first hand by walking the student’s journey to see highlights of interviews, surveys, and observations. At each site, we looked for patterns and synthesized the needs of students that might be having the most dramatic impact on transfer success and bachelor attainment. Here’s a few of the themes that rose to the top across the country. (We’ll be posting a blog soon.)

• For information flow, schools need to meet students where are, literally and figuratively, and information and service level needs to compete at the level of Amazon.
• Wherever they are, students want a place to call “home”.
• More exposure to majors, career, and external resources need to be made available to students… and it needs to happen as early as possible in a student’s journey.
• Leverage faculty-student relationships to help support transfer student experience.
• Pathways are only the start.

Miami Dade College transfer student sharing how different types of “personas” experience the transfer process 

Our work over the next couple of months will take some of the initial concepts and build prototypes around the student’s needs, behaviors, and motivations. Institutional teams are continuing to work with students, faculty and staff on ideating more concepts to take us to the next session where we will begin to evaluate the early prototypes against design criteria.