Complete College America and The Ada Center announced today the launch of a new step-by-step curriculum for colleges and universities—particularly Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs)—to navigate the increasingly complex landscape of student success technology. The five-part series provides campus leaders with instructional resources to identify, implement, maintain, and problem-solve around student success technology, ensuring that it ultimately supports, rather than impedes, student success and equity goals. 

The instructional series, developed by The Ada Center with resources and partnership from Complete College America, was supported by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Advising Success Network serves as a rollout partner and champion for the technology implementation series. The series was developed to address inequities around technology ecosystem implementation and efficacy that exist among institutions that play an outsized role in providing degrees and credentials that fuel the workforce and spur the creation of new knowledge. 

“MSIs have long been in the position of achieving higher relative rates of student success with fewer resources, and with this new curriculum, we can help to ease the web of complexity that comes with implementing critical student success technology,” Complete College America President Yolanda Watson Spiva said. “Through our partnership with the Ada Center and with the support of the Advising Success Network in sharing this curriculum with MSIs, student success practitioners across the country can deploy new resources to create higher-touch supports for students and build structures that equitably increase college completion rates and economic opportunity for learners across the country.”

The five modules of the series include discussion guides, planning templates, targeted tools, group activities, and links to multimedia resources, including video instruction and technology strategy planning templates. Created with MSIs as the primary focus for the modules, the curriculum creates space for institutions to align their technology strategy with their broader student success and equity goals. The exercises and resources within these modules are also widely applicable across the higher education field, from community colleges to large public universities. 

“For more than six years, The Ada Center has been developing this content with insight from hundreds of MSIs and access-focused institutions,” Sarah Zauner, executive director of The Ada Center, said. “We took the most common student success technology-related questions from practitioners across student affairs, academic affairs, IT, and institutional effectiveness, and turned that into a practical curriculum. Our hope is that this material can help institutions navigate challenges like prioritizing technology projects amid competing interests and fixing CRM implementations that have gone off-track. It’s another tool in the toolbox.”

The curriculum is available online on the Complete College America website at www.completecollege.org/msi-tech. The five modules, which are meant to be done in sequential order, are each accompanied by starter kits that highlight what’s offered in each section. The broader research that informed the curriculum, along with other higher education technology guides, can be viewed on The Ada Center’s resources page at www.theadacenter.org/resources. 

On January 29, 2024, at 2 pm ET, Complete College America and The Ada Center will be holding an informational webinar to help orient practitioners to these resources and address common student success technology-related questions and challenges. 

To attend the free webinar, register here.

For general questions about the curricular materials above, please contact Brittney Davidson, The Ada Center, at Brittney@theadacenter.org.

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About Complete College America

Complete College America (CCA) is a nationally recognized non-profit that builds movements for scaled change and transforms institutions through data-driven policies, student-centered perspectives, and equity-driven practices. Since its founding in 2009, CCA connects a national network of forward-thinking state and higher education leaders and introduces bold initiatives to help states and institutions confront inequities, close institutional performance gaps, and increase college completion rates, especially for marginalized and historically excluded students.

About The Ada Center
The Ada Center helps higher education leaders navigate and adopt technology-enabled practices that support student success and equity goals. We partner with states, institutions, and national organizations to provide practical research, strategic advisory support, and technical assistance. The Ada Center also hosts a library of open-access resources to help practitioners navigate common student success technology questions. You may find these at theadacenter.org/resources.

About the Advising Success Network
The Advising Success Network (ASN) is a network of organizations and individuals partnering to engage higher education institutions in holistic advising redesign activities to advance success for Black, Latinx/a/o, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander students and poverty-affected students. The network provides services and open access resources that guide institutions through self-reflecting and implementing evidence-based advising practices to advance a more equitable student experience in pursuit of a higher education landscape that has eliminated race and income as predictors of student success. We amplify the stories of higher education institutions that provide culturally responsive holistic student supports. The ASN is coordinated by NASPA – Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, and founding core partners included Achieving the Dream, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, EDUCAUSE, NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising, and the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.