Navigating Common Elements of an Orientation Program

Once you decide to go virtual, translating and perhaps modifying your orientation program to an online format will be the first step. Wisr encourages our partners to redistribute, not reinvent your programming. Think about how each aspect of your program can be reformatted for a virtual environment and scheduled to accommodate students who are distributed across several states, countries, and time zones. That may mean offering a live webinar once and recording it for later viewing or scheduling small group meetings at various times on various days of the week. Here are some examples of common programs that institutions hold during orientation with suggestions for reformatting.

Parents and Families

The question of whether parents and families should be included in your Wisr orientation community site continues to arise. If it is important for your institution to engage parents and family members in a similar manner to your new students, and if resources permit, we strongly suggest using the community visibility settings to create Communities that are visible specifically to parents and family members, similar to how you might host a parent and family orientation program, while maintaining student-only spaces using the visibility settings. Wisr Orientation sites, just like an on-campus program, should be a safe space for students to express themselves and engage with their new classmates, and using our community visibility settings to edit visibility by member type is a great way to allow different member types to freely engage in their own spaces on the site. The Wisr team can help you strategize on how to manage parents and family members and what other options might exist to ensure they receive the necessary resources they need for their student to successfully matriculate at your institution.

Codes of Conduct

Students typically learn about rights and expectations of their student experience during their orientation program. Since that experience likely will not have happened yet when students first enter their new Wisr site, we recommend creating a required custom field for students to acknowledge that their activity on their Wisr orientation site falls under the jurisdiction of their campus code of conduct. Having students agree to your policy provides coverage for your institution to remove students from the site and/or refer students through the disciplinary procedures at your institution, should students act inappropriately on your site. Sample language is available in the implementation planner for institutions to use in creating their site.

Academic Interest Sessions and Student Life Presentations

If you would normally hold academic interest sessions representing different schools or majors and sessions hosted by student life officers for new students, you should plan to continue doing just that. Students should still be introduced to the wealth of academic opportunities and support resources available to them. Whatever manner you would typically present this information (whether it be panel, presentation, or Q&A) can be recreated using Zoom webinar and meeting functionalities. We recommend using the Wisr events feature to schedule your sessions and easily give your students access to the respective Zoom links. Within Zoom, enable chat and Q&A to facilitate live questions as you normally would, and record the session for later viewing. While students (and their families!) might have only been able to watch one or two of these sessions live during a traditional on-campus orientation program, the content will now be available for them to view in a self-service manner.

We also recommend using a variety of different formats for the presentations, just as you would in person. Some information that requires a lot of detail may work better as a PowerPoint presentation with a presenter narrating so important details can be highlighted, while a faculty panel should look different and include faculty members engaging in conversation from their respective living rooms. Partnering with colleagues across campus to create these webinars will create a wealth of content for your Wisr site. As an added bonus for your colleagues, this information will only need to be presented once rather than several times during rotating sessions.

Incorporating your Learning Management System

Several campuses are discovering how to incorporate their learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard, etc.) and their Admissions functionality (Slate) into Wisr. Wisr is not a replacement for the systems that students will need to complete their pre-matriculation requirements or to continue using throughout their time at your institution. Instead, we suggest continuing to use those systems as they were intended to track documents or complete tasks. If you would normally create a course for your incoming students on your LMS in order to track completed action items, placement tests, etc., we encourage you to continue to do so. Use Wisr as a place to create a schedule for what is do when, highlight deadlines and send reminders, provide direct links to other platforms, and answer questions.

Small Group Meetings

Small group meetings are the most common aspect of orientation programs. Whether orientation groups led by student leaders, advising groups led by a faculty or staff advisor, or residence hall meetings led by RAs, these sessions aim to break down a very large population into smaller groups for students to make personal connections. This element of orientation will continue to prove beneficial and a Zoom call is the best way to replicate it in a virtual environment.

As we have all been on Zoom calls with too many people, paying close attention to your group size will be critical to allow conversation to flow as easily as possible. While OLs or advisors may have normally managed a group of 25-30, managing this many participants in one call can become challenging. Instead, consider breaking it up into three small groups of 10 students each, all managed by the same OL. Then, when it comes to social activities, these three groups can come together to participate as a larger team. For those of you running a one- or two-day program virtually, we recommend leaving these communities intact and allowing them to continue meeting if they choose and encouraging them to participate in social activities as a team with other groups led by the same OL.

Small groups should connect several times over the course of your program whether you are running a one-day or several week program. If you are running a one-day program that students register for, the expectation is that they are available at any time for the full program. If you are stretching your program out over several weeks, you may run into conflicts if you schedule a set meeting day and time for students. Incoming students as well as your orientation leaders may be juggling jobs and internships, summer classes, or family responsibilities at the same times that might be convenient for you. To conquer this, we recommend setting up a variety of days and times for meetings to occur. Perhaps you survey your orientation staff for their availability first, depending on how many groups you plan to manage, set a variety of days of the week and times for your incoming students to rank their preferences. Slate offers this functionality, or you can use a simple Google Form to create a ranking preference. From there, match students into their groups. If you are interested in having Wisr help create these small groups, we can use existing data to form matches. If you need to collect additional information for the matches, we can design a simple Typeform that collects student preferences.

Personal Connections

Personal interactions are critical to students feeling connected to institutions. One way to deepen personal connections is through one-on-one calls between students and college staff and/or student orientation leaders. Wisr technology has the capabilities to offer secure bridge-line calls between members of your community without the exchange of personal information. The default setting for Wisr Orientation clients is to have the call function disabled, but we can easily switch it on for any period of time during your orientation. Please note, that it can only be turned on and off for your entire member community and cannot be limited to certain member types. We also recommend you check out how to Configure Agendas for those calls and determine whether that feature is necessary.

Activities/Resources Fairs

Thinking about how to host a virtual activities or resource fair is a complicated matter. We liken the situation to a virtual career fair, and to really replicate the best experience possible would mean needing to contract a separate and expensive platform to create the most similar experience of having hundreds of tables out on your central quad for students to mix and mingle. We have come up with four alternative solutions that would allow for similar interactions, and each institution will need to decide which best fits their needs.

We will be the first to admit that none of these are likely perfect and will not be the same brisk fall breeze, free food, and running into old friends fairs that we all know and love. But they are all great options to introduce your students to the wide array of services available on campus and opportunities to be involved in at your institution. If done well, they could also be an unbelievable source of content and activity in your Wisr site. We recommend that you access the GetWisr Network, where you can watch our Webinar on how to use Wisr to run Wisr Open Houses on your site for day-long or week-long events.

Student Center/Union Party

If you typically include a party in your Orientation schedule that explores different rooms of your student center or union, why not recreate that event at home? Different vibes for different spaces! Create Zoom links for each room and set a vibe:

Dance party in the ballroom/living room – hire your favorite campus DJ to spin.
Snacks in the coffee shop/kitchen – is it weird to eat and drink while on Zoom? Not if everyone is doing it!
Zen space in the lounge/den, chill out and chat with your classmates
Game night in the game room – see the Social Programming Ideas article in the Content Ideas Community in the Wisr Customers Network
Live performance of your favorite local cover band on the quad (or in the backyard!).