Located in Washington, D.C., the American University’s AU Career Center has the privilege of hosting many employers throughout the academic year. They have a significant number of organization events and on-campus interviews as well as two large job fairs every year. Coupled with the myriad career coaching and other workshops they offer, career services staff is constantly kept on their toes.
Easily tracking attendance and capturing key academic and demographic student data is crucial for the office. Interested in learning more, we talked briefly with Systems Coordinator Adrian Sanchez about their use of kiosks in CSM.
Knowing your students with kiosks
We asked Adrian how the Kiosk module has enhanced their day-to-day operations. AU’s Career Center focuses on student attributes like major and class level when assessing event attendance. From this, they are able to determine student engagement for various student populations. This data also helps them predict which events will attract specific student groups. Most importantly, they see which events are overall most successful and have the data to support those assessments. Capturing this information also helps the office identify non-participating students and helps them design marketing efforts to engage these students more effectively.
Save time—and go paperless!
To illustrate the impact of kiosks, Adrian discussed their twice-annual Job and Internship Fair. At this event, the office hosts upwards of 1,300 students, so capturing student data quickly and easily with kiosks is vital to its success. Other offices on campus still use sign-in sheets or forms which obliviously slow down the check-in process and take away from the time that students spend actually attending the event.
At the Job and Internship fair, students simply swipe their ID card and the AU Career Center has everything it needs. Students can then concentrate on attending the fair and meeting with their targeted employers. Once the event has wrapped up, they can extract the event attendance information in minutes, sending detailed reports to various offices on campus.
Measureable + innovative + powerful
We asked Adrian if he had three words to describe the Kiosk module.
Measurable: Using the Kiosk module not only helps measure student attendance, it also helps gauge their student account management. Reporting on events will show information gaps in their student population. They can then work to obtain that missing information from their respective students. By tracking the events, they can also determine whether they have correct academic or demographic information for their students.
Innovative: Students are surprised and fascinated by the technology where they can just swipe their card and get a welcome message with their name when participating in an event. They also appreciate not having to fill out lengthy forms or find their names on sign-in sheets, which detracts from their participation in an event. AU Career Center recently moved to iPads for event check-ins and this has made it so much easier to be mobile and still provide the service they need.
Powerful: The ability to capture and report on this information which ties to the student record and event attendance as well as integrates with other modules in their system makes the Kiosk module a very powerful tool. They can obtain really meaningful data which enhances their office’s operations. They also really like the option to customize the kiosk including individualized welcome messages, check-in messages and adding branding to the kiosk screens to personalize it to their users.
