The Student Success Centre (SSC) was established to assist first year students in adjusting to university life. SSC organizes the Student Orientation programme to provide varied learning opportunities on the students’ journey towards academic success.
By leveraging on data captured throughout the campus facilities such as academic results, entry qualifications, class attendance, TIMeS access, and library usage, SSC manages the Learning Analytics platform to ensure the students’ learning experience is at the most optimum by benchmarking the data with the academic performance.
SSC works with all academic faculties through the Student Success Advisors (SSA) to implement a holistic approach beyond the orientation and induction week, to gear the students towards independence and success concerning their academic, curricular and personal developments.
The key objectives of the SSC are to:
The SSC facilitates the early engagement of first year students via the following:
Participating in the Student Orientation programme is crucial so that first year students are aware of the campus facilities and the variety of student support services available for them. Students are encouraged to actively seek out these services and view them as opportunities to deepen their leadership, communication, organizational and self-improvement skills.
Social integration is important to ensure students feel they belong to the campus community. By implementing buddy or senior student sharing sessions, first year students can have informal discussions about their learning experiences and to familiarize them with the university life.
First year students are encouraged to be actively involved in campus life and community activities. Students engage with various clubs and societies to harness opportunities to develop skills and make friends. This includes helping them to adjust to tertiary life and navigate the challenges in their first year experience via their peer network.
The Learning Analytics platform is an initiative to leverage on students’ learning data throughout their studies to identify the behaviour of successful students. This is set as the benchmark for managing “at-risk” students. The platform utilizes advanced analytics to be able to predict and prescribe students’ academic needs.
From Learning Analytics, SSC identifies “at-risk” students who require specific academic support. SSC and SSAs pro-actively take the necessary actions to ensure these students are able to go through the first year transition successfully. SSC works with the SSAs who develop First Year Experience (FYE) and Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PALS) programmes.