Focus Areas
Strategic Priority Statement
Lake Land College will enable students to fit education within their active work and personal lives. We will streamline enrollment processes and technology, provide customer-centric schedules and learning options, and facilitate access to comprehensive support services.
Please use the accordion feature to view the Guiding Questions under each objective.
1. Streamline Enrollment Processes and Technology
Guiding Questions
- Does the process ensure a student can apply and onboard within 24 hours, and quicker for returning students?
- Does the process promote the “once a student, always a student” mantra, allowing returning students with some college credit to re-enroll without repeating the full application process?
- What would it take to build a one-stop, mobile-friendly enrollment portal optimized for low-bandwidth or mobile-only users in our region?
Guiding Questions
- How do we ensure each student has one point of contact to connect them with needed support through every leg of their Lake Land experience?
- Can a student-customer access needed support 24×7 and beyond normal working hours?
- Does our process for providing support build on the College’s culture that all employees have the ability to assist our student-customers?
- How could we utilize Agentic-AI to rapidly address common student questions and ensure staff have time to develop personalized relationships with students in need of greater support?
- Are we providing prospective student-customers multiple, in-person access points to support the application, onboarding, and enrollment process using technology tools in locations where they live, work, and play?
Guiding Questions
- Does the software facilitate centralized and readily accessible data for assessment, analytics and decision making?
- Are we streamlining our software ecosystem by minimizing the need for stand-alone systems, thereby reducing security risks, complexity, training, and support requirements?
- Have we identified all Lake Land processes that need to be changed to eliminate customization and allow for a standardized implementation approach of the SaaS software?
- What training or education will each stakeholder group need to adapt to Colleague SaaS?
Guiding Questions
- Do the processes supporting this initiative substantially match the software’s capabilities without driving software customization? In essence, keeping the software near “off the shelf”?
- Are we applying best practices in universal design?
- Do we understand the usability barriers, and are we ensuring every digital process is intuitive for student-customers with diverse abilities?
2. Provide Customer-centric Schedules and Learning Options
- Are we ensuring that in-person course offerings are not compressed to certain times of the day?
- Can a student-customer complete the vast majority of their courses in-person if desired?
- Can student-customers from diverse backgrounds build schedules that truly fit within the realities of their lives using innovative modalities such as:
- Hybrid and HyFlex modalities as well as offerings at satellite centers
- Learning pathways outside the traditional 16-week semester (e.g., 5-week sprints, 8-weeks semesters, rolling or monthly starts)
- In-person program that runs entirely on evenings/weekends
- Block scheduling for individual programs or general education courses
- Competency based education offerings
- Are we balancing and aligning faculty capacity, program accreditation, and resource allocation with the need for flexible scheduling?
- Is there academic quality and consistency across delivery modalities?
- Can a student-customer clearly visualize and build a pathway to achieve their career and educational goals at Lake Land College?
- Are we developing and enhancing partnerships with regional, state and national employers to support educational opportunities and learning options for student-customers?
- Do the identified outcomes and metrics of educational programs demonstrate the value of the Laker education?
- Are we able to determine student-customers’ return on their investment and effectively market the value of the Laker education to prospective student-customers?
- Do we understand, know, and support student-customers’ career goals?
3. Facilitate Access to Comprehensive Support Services
- Does technology training and support facilitate the success of student-customers (e.g., Canvas, Microsoft Suite, Navigate, HUB)?
- Are we effectively evaluating where our students commonly get lost, stuck, or give up when utilizing technology?
- Are we implementing tools to track and assess students’ usage of support services, and have we incorporated predictive modeling to evaluate the impact on student success?
- Can a student-customer access needed support 24×7 and beyond normal working hours?
- How do we ensure each student has one point of contact to connect them with needed support through every leg of their Lake Land experience?
- Do we clearly understand the support needs of student-customers (i.e., childcare, transportation, mental health, or financial), and are we facilitating access to services that support their educational success?
- Are we connecting them to the resources they need to thrive?
- Are student-customers receiving timely advisement and communication, allowing them to proactively plan their educational path for future enrollment?