Pepperdine Introduces New Student Success Platform Navigate
Seaver College, in partnership with the Educational Advisory Board (EAB), has announced
the launch of Navigate, a new platform that focuses on comprehensive student academic
support and success. With a core objective to guide students throughout their Pepperdine
journeys from orientation to graduation, Navigate is a powerful new tool that integrates
with several existing University enterprise systems, allowing students greater control
of their academic experience with the long-term objective of improving both graduation
and retention rates. Incoming students will be able to use the Navigate mobile app,
which launched in the App Store and Google Play on May 1, to keep track of important
tasks and facilitate their progress toward timely degree completion. Students will
also be able to schedule advising and student success appointments with faculty and
staff directly from within the app.
The innovative platform is also intended to become a more centralized advising hub, offering a shared workspace for faculty and staff to engage with students in more cohesive and meaningful ways. Advisors will be able to build four-year academic plans for students in the platform and share notes across the University’s various support areas. The desktop advising platform for faculty and staff advisors will be available for use beginning in August for the fall 2019 semester, at which time the Navigate mobile app will be available to all returning Seaver students.
“The success of our students is of foremost importance to Seaver College, and I am excited at the potential of the Navigate platform to increase the engagement of students in their education,” expressed Michael Feltner, dean of Seaver College. “Based on the success of other institutions, the advising and communication features of Navigate, and the robust analytics capabilities of the platform, I am confident that two critical metrics of student success—retention and graduation rates—for both four- and six-year tracks, will be enhanced when Navigate is implemented.”
Pepperdine University’s plans to develop Navigate began in 2017, when a group of Seaver College faculty, staff, and administrators convened to investigate a new solution to enhance student success. In this investigation, the group sought to identify a platform to support comprehensive student academic resources, promote increasingly robust academic advising capabilities, and provide meaningful analytics and measurement data to improve student success. After receiving positive responses from various college constituencies, two leading companies in the field presented their offerings. Upon critical review and reflection, Seaver College formalized an agreement to adopt the Navigate platform through EAB in spring 2018 and began the technical implementation process in July 2018.