Dear Colleagues,
It was good to see many of you at the Stellic Kickoff events last month. We appreciate your interest and attention, and we recognize that your engagement with this project reflects your deep commitment to our students. Below you’ll find key takeaways from these events and information about next steps.
At each kick-off event, the Stellic Project Team:
- reminded us of our goal to develop a more holistic and equitable advising experience for all undergraduate students;
- previewed key features of the platform including course planning tools, notes, referrals, reports, appointment scheduling, and messaging; and
- reviewed the project timeline.
If you missed it, we invite you to watch a recording of the kickoff webinar from February 14th.
On February 19th, future users who serve in various advising roles gathered in the Newcomb Ballroom to workshop guiding principles for implementation. Highlights from this meeting include:
- Participants emphasized the importance of effective communication, proactive support, and continuous improvement in advising processes as we move through implementation.
- Participants posed questions about permissions, student privacy, and the timeline.
On February 22nd, Directors of Undergraduate Programs and School Registrars met to learn about their roles in the Stellic Implementation process. Highlights from this meeting include:
- Schools and departments will play a key role in validating academic requirements in Stellic to ensure reliability, accuracy, and optimal functionality.
- Stellic will complement SIS, providing comprehensive course planning tools. Students will complete course enrollment in SIS.
- Academic requirements will be built in the degree audit module of Stellic. Eventually, the Academic Advisement modules in SIS (including the AR Report) will be turned off.
We look forward to continuing conversations about next steps and engaging with you throughout the implementation process. To learn more about the project, refer to the Stellic Implementation website, including a list of FAQs.
The Stellic Project Team will be in touch in the coming weeks to set up school/unit working groups and continue to build degree audits. If you have questions, please write to the project team at [email protected].
The Stellic Project Team
Dear colleagues,
As you may be aware, the University has selected Stellic to be the new advising software platform for use by our undergraduates and their advisors-- including advisors in the schools, Student Affairs, and other central support units. We are writing to share some background and information about the work ahead as we prepare for implementation.
In March 2022, an advising task force charged by the Provost recommended that we work to make our advising processes more holistic, collaborative, and proactive. One specific recommendation was to adopt a software platform to support undergraduate advising across the University. A committee of twenty-five faculty and staff from across Grounds worked from July 2022 until March 2023 to identify important functions for such a platform and evaluate available options. Following two rounds of software demonstrations, a review of written proposals from vendors, and consideration of feedback from more than 150 faculty, staff, and students who attended in-depth demonstrations, the committee recommended that Stellic be adopted in a phased approach.
What will Stellic do and when? In short, Stellic will support three sets of functions:
- enhanced degree and course planning tools for students
- tools to improve communication between students and advisors (e.g., appointments, referrals, group, and individual messaging)
- reporting dashboards and tools for advisors and administrators.
The functions and users will be introduced in a phased approach. We anticipate that all undergraduate students will have access to the degree audit and planning tools in fall 2024. Engineering will pilot the advising communication tools at that point, and advisors and students in other schools will gain access to those tools in the next phase. Additional updates regarding the timeline will be available in early 2024.
How will we make this happen? We have a lot of work ahead of us to enable the rich capabilities within Stellic, and the Provost’s Office has invested in additional staffing to support that work.
Stellic’s Degree Audit tool will enable students and advisors to track degree requirement completion, replacing our current Academic Requirements (AR) tool. A team from the Office of the University Registrar, led by Kiama Anthony Bishop, will manage this work. James Cobb recently joined this team as Associate Director of Degree Audit, and they are in the process of hiring additional staff to program the course requirements into Degree Audit, with assistance from Tracy Pettit’s ITS Enterprise Applications team. As the work proceeds, Kiama and James will be in touch with registrar staff in the schools and others whose work relates closely to these systems.
We will also implement Stellic’s Advise tool, which will provide advisors with a slate of tools to send messages to individuals or groups of advisees, schedule appointments, manage notes, and make referrals to other offices. A team from the Georges Student Center, led by Katie Densberger, will manage the implementation of these tools. Erica Ford and Sarah Dodge recently joined Katie’s team as Associate Directors of Advising Technology. Katie, Erica, and Sarah will be in touch with many of you who work in advising roles to learn how you do that work with each other and with students.
We want to clarify one key point: PeopleSoft (aka SIS) will still be the student information system. SIS performs numerous functions beyond tracking academic requirements. Degree requirements will be programmed into Stellic, which will be integrated with PeopleSoft/SIS so that the two systems can work together.
Project leadership and guidance: This project is sponsored by Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Brie Gertler, Chief Information Officer Kelly Doney, Interim Vice President for Student Affairs Chris Holstege, and Vice Provost for Enrollment Steve Farmer. Members of each of our teams are closely collaborating on this project, and ITS Director of Project Management Patti Pate is overseeing the implementation work. A steering committee representing more than 20 schools and units across Grounds will advise the whole project; a committee of similar size will advise the configuration of the advising communication tools. As each school’s launch nears, we’ll work with the school to form an internal team to help with locally-relevant configuration and implementation needs.
How we’ll keep you informed: If you received this email, you have already been subscribed to a newsletter, which we will use to send monthly updates and other timely communications. Please invite interested colleagues to subscribe by filling out this form. We have just launched a website with general project information. In January, we will hold a virtual kickoff event to make important announcements about the timeline and phases of the project. You can reach the project team at any point with questions by emailing [email protected].
We know that many of you are eager to contribute to this work and that others have questions and suggestions. We’re committed to sharing key updates with you as soon as we are able and to getting wide-ranging feedback throughout the implementation process. We are genuinely excited about the opportunities and tools that will come with this new platform, and we can’t wait to share our excitement with you. We also appreciate the care that a project of this scale and complexity requires and are thus approaching both the work and our communications thoughtfully.
Thanks for your interest, and we look forward to engaging more with you soon!
Brie
Brie Gertler
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
On behalf of the executive committee:
Kelly Doney, Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Steve Farmer, Vice Provost for Enrollment
Chris Holstege, Interim Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer