Hello,

My institution started using CircleIn this semester, Spring 2021.

We decided to use it to provide an additional layer of academic support to students (we provide peer subject tutoring for a limited number of courses, writing/coaching are available to all students) and wanted to leverage peer-to-peer support for more courses. We hoped to respond to student concerns around studying in isolation and help to facilitate social/academic connections between students living on campus, living in our college town, or working remotely from home. We also found the results of assessment from Monroe Community College promising and aligned with our mission/vision/values around improving equitable outcomes for students.

We worked with our IT team and our marketing team to implement the program on our campus. We had a bit of a later launch related to a campus-level change in our student email and single sign-on authentication. They have onboarded new team members to help improve the process for future launches. They provide materials around marketing the system to students, faculty, and staff. We ended up editing a lot of those templates to language more consistent with our communication style.

We had success early on with faculty engagement and interest. Faculty were interested in attending trainings about CircleIn and we were able to address the concerns they had. Faculty liked that aside from promoting the platform, there is no additional work for them.

We have about 8% adoption for our campus, ~600 students on CI, and that number increases slightly every day.  We find that students use the platform for managing their own tasks and academic work rather than the collaborative elements. We are currently planning our campus-level assessment of the platform to get a better understanding of the use of CI and associated outcomes.

I am happy to talk more about our experience with CircleIn, if you have any questions.

Best,

Jess