Co-Curricular Paths help your students navigate their options to a specific destination of learning or achievement you have identified, all the while allowing you to track the student's progress. While some Co-Curricular Paths consist entirely of event attendance tracking and can monitor progress independently, other paths incorporate self-reported experiences that require further participation from the student. Taking the time to market your Path will not only help students understand how to use the tool for their benefit, but it will also promote follow-through for items that take additional time. Read on for three major considerations when creating marketing for your path.
Consider the Scale of Your Path
Some Co-Curricular Paths are easier to market than others. For example, a path oriented around the first year experience might be simple to promote through Academic Advising, a University 101 course, and during Orientation, as natural points of contact with the first year class. Paths that are quick and easy and bundled with many incentives can draw attention with very simple digital and print marketing campaigns. Like other areas of marketing, consider the target audience for your path and what they will need to see about it to become interested. Leverage campus partners and others who will be invested in students' success within your path to help promote and refer students to it.
Orient Students to Accessing the Path
We love this example of print marking from Pennsylvania State University: Behrend. The full PDF is also attached, which details items listed in each domain. This simple and eye-catching visual very briefly describes to the student how to access their Path, and even provides a hashtag for following along on social media!
Set Expectations
Fairleigh Dickinson University's School of Pharmacy & Health Sciences cohort-based Doctor of Pharmacy program uses their paths to inform their accreditation reporting, but they include a number of self-reported experience items in their paths to offer flexibility to students in meeting their goals. Ultimately, this campus decided to build the below graphic to illustrate some examples for their 4th year (P4) students on what kind of self-reported experience could be completed during their year-long off-campus rotations and where they fit under their different learning outcomes, which are demonstrated in the path as domains.
In the attached examples, you'll read more about how Fairleigh Dickinson describes its domains to students with more detail on what they'll be learning in the path and how they'll get there. This campus found from its early assessment that students were not fully making this connection, and by creating these physical marketing materials and updating their domain and item descriptions, they were able to bridge this gap.