The traditional college experience is evolving due to the recent pandemic, and with that comes the need for new tools and processes to support students, faculty, and administration. Capacity enables higher education institutions to deliver higher quality services at a lower cost while improving student outcomes.
By embracing innovative and revolutionary approaches to student learning, institutions can continue to provide their students and administration with instant support. The Capacity AI continuously learns from organizational knowledge, data, and the interactions within a university to automate processes and decisions whether courses are held in-person, online, or hybrid.
In-person support.
Capacity partners with universities to develop a self-service channel to answer common student questions 24/7 so the on-campus student population can access instant information without overrunning the administration with FAQs during regular office hours.
Capacity’s chat interface was added to Maryville University’s orientation site as a web concierge to answer new students’ questions as they get acquainted with their surroundings and schedule such as, “how can I contact my professor?” or “where is my syllabus?” Rather than emailing the professor or setting up an appointment with the teaching assistant, students could get their questions answered by Capacity.
Just like the students, faculty, and administration can also use Capacity at any hour of the day to instantly access answers regarding their benefits and policy information. By storing the employee handbook in the Capacity Cloud Drive, any administration member can get answers to their questions about short-term disability, insurance plans, paid-time-off, etc.
Seeing how helpful a chat interface can be for students and faculty began to shed light on the ways Capacity can support online students and drive better graduation rates in general.
Online support.
With the transition from in-person to online classes, Capacity’s conversational AI chatbot achieved the goal of answering students’ questions as they got acquainted with the new processes and online systems. However, In addition to collaborating with institutions to build a knowledge base that includes content related to common online student questions, Capacity was also able to step in as a virtual teaching assistant for questions on the specific courses each student was enrolled in.
Rather than setting up an appointment with the teaching assistant, students could get their questions answered by the Capacity chatbot. In just the first week after implementation, Capacity answered 40 student questions at a response rate of 2.7 seconds.
In addition to answering student questions about their courses, Capacity integrates with the apps and programs that students work in on a daily basis, such as Canvas. This empowers instructors to provide online students with access to relevant functions and data via the Capacity conversational interface, which creates one central channel for all student support.
Even before administration offices were closed due to COVID-19, many processes that included paperwork were tedious. Capacity can now automate processes such as transcript requests and filing for refunds with our workflow feature. This saves the administration time and the students extra stress on top of their current workload.
For the questions and processes that do need human support, Capacity can route unanswered questions from online students to administration members via guided conversation technology. Essentially, Capacity empowers the administration to triage multi-step or difficult-to-answer questions through a conversational tree, which increases the ability for online students to get access to the right resources without having to connect directly with a live person.
The Capacity helpdesk also empowers university administration and faculty by enabling them to route, assign, categorize, manage, and track the history of the questions that come in from online students.
Hybrid support.
Whether in-person or online, Capacity can use a student’s behavior, performance, and demographics to determine how likely they’ll drop out of classes. For example, by noticing if students view their syllabus before the course or viewing attendance, Capacity can automatically intervene at the right time by sending reminders and alerts to encourage students to stay enrolled in classes.
The future is unknown in many industries including higher education. By supporting students, faculty, and administration with an AI-powered platform in class and online, the transition between the two will be seamless enough to create a heightened experience for all regardless of the location.