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During our training sponsored by Google and the Hasso-Platner Stanford Institute of Design, our team utilized the principles of design thinking to identify the following issue on CSUF's campus: a lack of student engagement. This is in part due to CSUF's reputation as a commuter school, which is garnered from its geographical location as a midpoint between cities. As students fight for parking and adhere to the practice of attending class only to immediately return home afterwards, they forego the various opportunities provided by our campus' numerous resources. Student and faculty-led organizations observe decreases in membership, sports events report less turnout, and students are unable to unearth their potential during their college experience.
After ideating, empathizing, and defining this issue, the 2018 University Innovation Fellow cohort at CSUF has vowed to tackle the lack of student engagement on campus utilizing technology. Our team's perspective was derived from a series of conversations with stakeholders including student leaders and higher education executives. From these meetings, we concluded that this underlying issue lies internally within the student and faculty organizations. Lack-luster communication channels, unincentivized call-to-actions, weak social media presence, and inefficient information channels are also concerns that both students, student leaders, and faculty have echoed. Thus, it is our team's objective, or "strategic priority", is to enhance each of these organizational functions for our campus resources by connecting them with technological applications that may provide automation or stronger infrastructure. More information can be found [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P84L-KViigE here.<br/>]<br/><span style="font-size:medium;">'''<u>Current Status:</u>'''</span>
Initially, our primary strategic priority did not revolve around student engagement. Instead, we had a goal of incorporating a General Education course about entrepreneurship and design thinking for all majors. However, halfway into our training, we performed a feasability analysis of this previous project alongside a seasoned faculty member, who helped us decide that the project was impractical given our personal time-frame goals. This resulted in our team scratching the previous project and searching for a new primary strategic priority.