Dear colleagues,
In our last newsletter, we focused on the first challenge our Digital Holistic Student Supports (DHSS) work aims to solve: disconnected data.
Today, information about students is often scattered across many systems — from financial aid and course registration to advising platforms, career services, and basic needs support. That makes it harder for advisors to understand what students need — and harder for students to get timely help.
So, disconnected data is one problem and ensuring that data is easily accessible and presented in an engaging, actionable, and intuitive way is the other problem.
DHSS is designed to solve for both the data connectivity and the comprehensive user interface (UI) that together transform how students, advisors, and administrators enable student success. Today’s note is focused on the latter.
One emerging approach is using a single AI-enabled digital experience that is designed to support students and institutions across the full lifecycle of their higher education experience — recruitment, enrollment, advising, and student support.
This work is being advanced in partnership with Canyon GBS, building software for student success, bringing messaging, advising, and support into a single experience so students don’t have to navigate multiple systems.
What makes this different is not just the technology, but how it comes together:
- A unified digital experience where students can access support, resources, and guidance in one place
- Advisors can quickly see what a student needs and reach out earlier
- Routine tasks are automated with AI so staff can focus more on advising conversations with students
Colleges and universities are using CanyonGBS developed Advising App™, focused on student engagement, and Aiding App™, focused on service management to transform how they engage with students and deliver services —expanding access to AI, strengthening support for workforce and community programs, and creating more effective and efficient interventions.
We’re starting to see what this looks like in practice. Institutions are finding powerful and diverse ways to leverage AI to deliver holistic student supports. For example, Lewis and Clark Community College is implementing Advising App to enhance self-service and activate a more effective digital front door with AI-powered capabilities so students get answers faster. A. T. Still University has adopted Aiding App as a comprehensive case management solution, providing coordinated care for students. Canyon’s products provide affordable, controlled, safety compliant access to enterprise AI that can extend student supports as well as answer advisor and administrator questions in a safe environment, contextualized to that institution. Kaskaskia College is using Advising App to provide institution-wide access to AI, increasing efficiency and engagement at scale to support student success. These examples highlight how nimble and responsive institutions can be when they leverage a flexible and affordable AI-enabled student success tool—getting resolution to students’ questions and issues in minutes, not days.
Across these approaches, students can get support faster and access services in real time with AI-enabled advisors. Advisors can better personalize and coordinate student care with AI, applying the technology to do things like annotating a holistic student record, summarizing interactions and flagging follow-up items. This eliminates common friction points like students having to tell their stories multiple times to multiple departments or the frustration so many working students feel when they can’t get support after business hours. For advisors these approaches mean they don’t have to spend valuable face-to-face time trying to piece together the student’s situation by opening 5-7 systems and can instead focus on the meaningful human interaction that we know drives student success. Canyon GBS takes a compelling approach to innovation by focusing on applying AI into existing institutional ecosystems in a way that is practical, scalable, affordable, and impactful.
Connecting data is what makes insight possible and designing better experiences helps make that insight actionable. When these pieces come together, institutions can move toward connected, proactive support, expanding access to support, turning insights into action, and delivering more responsive, connected experiences for students and the communities they serve.
Because the goal isn’t just better systems, it’s a better experience for students and the people supporting them. We look forward to building on this work.
Regards,
Patrick Methvin,
Director, Postsecondary Success