Behind the Scenes: Faculty-Staff Collaboration in a Student Success Effort

• In Event: Institutional Policies and Practices that Support Student Success in College

Abstract

This study explores the collaboration between faculty and staff in implementing an academic chatbot in a STEM course to improve student outcomes at a large public university. Recent research illustrates the promise of interventions that change faculty behavior or classroom practices and point to questions about how faculty collaborate with university staff focused on student success (hereafter “success staff”) (Carrell & Kurlaender, 2023; Park & Xu, 2024). Despite the growing focus on postsecondary student success overall, faculty involvement in postsecondary success interventions remains underexplored in the literature.

This study addresses this gap by examining how faculty and staff worked together to implement a chatbot intervention designed to send course-specific text messages to students. This study is a part of a larger study that aims to understand the effectiveness of incorporating AI-enabled chatbot communication (“the chatbot”) into academic courses. This paper focuses on two main research questions: (1) What organizational processes, roles, and routines support the implementation of this course-based intervention? (2) What challenges arise when faculty and staff collaborate on a technology-based academic intervention?

This is a qualitative study focused on the university’s first implementation of a chatbot into a STEM course for intended STEM majors. The data for this study come from interviews with all of the faculty, staff, and teaching assistants (n=9) involved in the intervention during the early intervention period (Summer 2024). We analyzed the interviews to uncover the practices that facilitate and constrain faculty and staff collaboration in the context of an intervention to improve academic success. After transcribing the interviews, we followed a flexible coding approach, first indexing the transcripts for participants’ descriptions of collaboration (Deterding & Waters, 2021). We then applied analytic codes to this indexed data and organized the data using tables and visual representations (Miles et al., 2014).

Preliminary findings indicate that implementing the chatbot required significant adjustments in organizational processes, including the development of new communication channels and roles. Both faculty and staff described the growing pains of forging new channels of communication, working relationships, and shared expectations across siloed parts of the university. Faculty and staff had differing perspectives on student challenges, with faculty focusing on course-specific skills gaps and staff emphasizing broader student needs. Graduate teaching assistants are key intermediaries, helping to bridge gaps between faculty and staff and ensuring the chatbot was effectively integrated into the course.

These findings suggest that even seemingly low-touch interventions require substantial coordination and realignment of university processes. Given these organization-specific realignments, this paper provides an explanation for the well-established challenges with scaling low-touch interventions.

Author

• Ellen Bryer, Brown University
  Presenting Author