By: Isabella Bercan
At Dominican, being a student means having endless opportunities to attend meetings, events, and so much more, hosted by a wide range of clubs and organizations. As a community, we have all become quite familiar with EngageDU for finding out what events and meetings are occurring on campus. This platform also allowed us to RSVP for said events, which made it easier for those hosting events to anticipate and plan for the correct number of attendees.
This semester it has been replaced by DU BeInvolved, a new system which is meant to gamify student engagement and appeal to the large commuter student population, according to graduate assistant for registered student organizations in the OSI, Jason Kougan. “We are a smaller campus… and a lot of times, we don’t get a lot of engagement from students, particularly from commuters… we want to make their experience at Dominican more meaningful and fun, other than just showing up, going to class, and then going back home.” At first glance the website is quite daunting as Senior SIRC worker Anthony put it, “…it’s kind of confusing at first. I really enjoyed [EngageDU], just because there was more information and it was straight forward.”
As Kougan mentioned, there is an effort to “gamify” student engagement through a point system which will help track a student’s engagement. There are plans for a leaderboard for students that are most involved, “…prizes are going to be in it for students with the most engagement… that hasn’t been quite built out yet.” He confirmed this reward system is being worked on by Dr. Lara, Associate Vice President of Student success and engagement, and the pro staff at OSI.
With a switch as significant as this one for campus events, there are organizations such as the Campus Activities Board (CAB) that are trying to adjust to the change. President Aldo Cervantes and his team are going back to their roots by having students follow their socials to stay up to date.
“Right now, we know we won’t be able to publish a lot of events, and students don’t know what DU BeInvolved is yet… follow du_cab on Instagram to catch up with a lot of the events we got lined up…”
CAB is famous for hosting some of the biggest events for student engagement on campus such as Casino Night which will be March 27th. Cervantes believes this change will benefit the community, “…in a meeting with Dr. Lara, we learned about all the fun things students can do through DU BeInvolved that weren’t available with EngageDU.”
As he stated at a meeting with all the leaders of the Dominican student organizations, “…this was presented to them at one of the Leadership Council meetings…to give them a heads-up that this was coming.” Kougan shared. CAB has been working with OSI learning about DU BeInvolved, “it has been a learning experience for all of us.” Cervantes stated.
This current version of DU BeInvolved is a soft launch. Right now, student organizations are allowed to explore the service and learn the ins and outs of the platform. Kougan shared lastly that they are figuring out what can be “adjusted and fixed.” The full launch will be the Fall semester of this year.
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