For many students today, especially those at community colleges, the higher education experience is likely to be anything but traditional. Cochise College classes are held at all hours of the day in locations across the county, and with more fully online classes available than ever before, they’re learning while overseas and during times that more conveniently fit into their everyday hectic lives.
This summer, that kind of flexibility is extending to the college’s Student Services department and its counselors and advisers. Cochise is in the early stages of rolling out a new web-based program called MyDegreePlan, which will allow students to easily track their academic progress, efficiently achieve their goals and complete their degrees.
By accessing MyDegreePlan, current students will find an online page that displays his or her major and degree, and breaks it down by classes completed, in progress or still needed to graduate. Students will soon be able to access the site on their own to find out what grade they need in a class to raise their cumulative GPA, or if a particularly interesting course offered next semester will transfer to the university they’re looking at next, or what would happen if, hypothetically, they decided to completely switch majors.
The move to assist students through this type of online resource is one being made my many institutions across the nation. So far, more than 550 colleges and universities worldwide have licensed DegreeWorks, which is MyDegreePlan’s parent program.
“We’ve joined the 21st century,” laughed Mark Boggie, Assistant Dean of Student Services at Cochise College. “We’re one of the few community colleges in the state that still do degree audits by hand. We want to save on our man power and become more efficient for students, too.”
The benefits of the program for students will extend far beyond the simple convenience of accessing advising resources off campus, which is especially helpful for Online Campus students who live out of state or are deployed overseas.
MyDegreePlan is also designed to enhance the face-to-face advising session, since counselors will be able to spend the more advising time discussing the best course and degree plan options rather than hunting through the entire course catalog or dealing with stacks of paperwork.
Also, new financial aid rules will soon begin impacting how much federal aid some students receive and for how long they’ll be able to receive it. These kinds of restrictions should urge those who are undecided on a major to buckle down and finish their associate degree. MyDegreePlan helps those students see how all of those classes taken in a wide array of departments can fit together to help them graduate, thus saving time and money.
“It can show them where they’re at based on the classes they’re taking,” said Jenyl Heckman, who is in her first year as an adviser at Cochise College. “Then they see if they focus how much faster they’ll get done with a program.”
Boggie said many students come into Student Services without a clear idea of what they want to study and their infamous first words are “I just want to take the basics.” Surveys, tests and other career exploration tools help those students, and their counselors, find out where their interests lie and get them started within a degree program, but Boggie said sometimes harder than getting students started on a plan is getting them to finish.
“It’s about helping them look at the bigger picture,” he said. “We’re pushing students to decide on a major, away from ‘undeclared,’ and not that they have to stay in that major, but at least they have a goal to meet and they can work toward it.”
For the students who tend to avoid sitting down for advising sessions or those who simply aren’t able to visit a campus or center, MyDegreePlan should reduce potential issues once students believe it’s their last semester. Heckman said in the past year at Cochise and during her previous experience as a counselor at Southwestern Michigan College, she’s worked with students who tried to map out their class schedules each semester and overall degree plan all on their own, only to find out just weeks before graduation that they missed something along the way.
“In the future, this will also help us plan schedules based on student need,” Boggie said. “We can determine eventually how many students will need certain classes and hopefully be able to accommodate that.”
Cochise College advisers and counselors began using MyDegreePlan with a limited number of students in June and are expecting the program to be available for all enrolled students by the time the fall semester begins in August.
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