The Co-Curricular Opportunity features of Involve allow you to design student experiences centered around customized learning outcomes. The five components of our CCO feature include Experiences, Skills, Points, Service Hours, and Pathways. These features, on their own or combined within learning pathways, enable you to create and track an abundance of opportunities for students.

Our Co-Curricular Opportunities are all trackable and measurable. Once a student completes an opportunity, it will be reflected on the student’s SmartTranscript. Even if your institution removes or edits an opportunity, that accomplishment will still be present on the student’s profile. This ensures that you can keep your opportunities up to date and relevant to your student development initiatives!

Experiences are one of the most customizable aspects of our Co-Curricular Opportunities feature. Experiences can be created as awards programs, internships, certifications, study abroad programs, first-year experiences, orientation, leadership programs, and more!

There are many ways to build your campus experiences; the only limitation is your imagination! Experiences can be automatically earned through pathways, manually granted to students by administrators or students can apply to earn the Experiences. They can be open to everyone or hidden by enrollment to select students. They can be individual experiences or part of a larger series of opportunities.

Skills are developmental milestones you’d like to encourage your students to reach. In Involve, skills are grouped into larger Competencies you’d like for your students to master. You can also add Levels to your skills to increase the depth of their development. In the image below, you can see that the Competency is “Cognitive Complexity.” The skills one must gain to earn this Competency are “Critical thinking, Reflective thinking, Effective reasoning, and Creativity.” There are various Levels attached to these Competencies and Skills, which help measure the extent of a student’s mastery in regards to that particular developmental goal.

If you’d like to learn more about Skills, Competencies, and Levels, then we have a support article just for you!

Skills and Experiences are frequently used together in Pathways to enhance student learning. For example, you may have a Skill called “Speaking a foreign Language” that could be required to earn a “Global Citizenship Certificate” that you have set up as an Experience. Our Co-Curricular Opportunities have been curated to be used together to create a unique, structured, and comprehensive program for your students!

Points are perhaps the best way to gamify your students’ co-curricular experience. Similar to experiences and skills, points may be automatically earned when they have a Pathway attached. They can also be manually granted to students by campus administrators with the correct access.

Oftentimes, campuses will reward students with points for things like attending events, filling out forms and surveys, and completing other Co-Curricular Opportunities. Upon earning a certain amount of Points, they can be redeemed by the earner. What they can be redeemed for is totally up to your institution. You could offer prizes like school swag or grant special opportunities like early access to highly anticipated events!

Some campuses set a required amount of points students need to earn each semester to be in good standing with the university. This is very popular amongst our religious institutions as a way to encourage and track chapel attendance! You can also set up different kinds of points to better assess which kinds of programs are encouraging the most engagement.

If you are interested in setting up Points, you will need to reach out to customer support to review the next steps.

The Service Hours feature is unique amongst the Co-Curricular Opportunities in that it does not have its own tab on the student portal. This is because Service Learning programs can be integrated with every part of the student experience.

Service Hours may be used to earn Experiences, Points, or Skills. There are also many ways to earn Service Hours. Like Experiences, Points, and Skills, they may be automatically earned via a Pathway or by being attached to events and earned upon attendance. They may also be manually granted by a campus administrator with the proper access. Learn more about Manually Granting Service Hours here.

Pathways enable you to connect all of the Co-Curricular Opportunities you create with each other and with the rest of your Involve platform. You will begin by deciding which Opportunity you want a student to earn. Then, you will determine what a student needs to do in order to earn that opportunity.

Let’s look at an example! In the following Pathway, there are four conditions outlined that will allow a student to earn the Career Readiness Certification. Once a student completes all of the conditions, they will automatically be granted the Experience.

Pathways are the best way to automate your Co-Curricular Opportunities. Setting up a Pathway ensures that our system will keep track of your student's developmental progress, so you don’t have to worry about manually granting Opportunities to students.

Pathways are a great way to enable students to earn Opportunities, but they are not the only way. As mentioned previously, all Opportunities may be manually granted by administrators with the correct access. They may also be earned through event attendance. Students can also apply to earn these opportunities outside of institution-established routes through the Apply for Opportunity form. Students can access the Apply for Opportunity form by going to their profile and selecting the "Apply for Opportunity" button at the top of the timeline. Clicking that button will take you to the Apply for Opportunity form.

One last note! These features must be enabled by your Expert to appear on your dashboard menu. If you are ready to set up Co-Curricular Opportunities on your campus, then reach out to customer support today!