North Dakota State launched a new site, MyNDSU, to help connect students with the community and track their campus involvement. “It is similar to Blackboard, as it is a way to organize organization information,” executive commissioner of the Congress of Student Organizations Lauren McNaughton said.
The new site includes links to Blackboard, Campus Connection, NDSU email and the NDSU website. As a result, students have one location to find all their important web-based information.
MyNDSU also helps students find information about organizations. The site lists 288 organizations at NDSU. Each organization’s page has key information about the group, most notably their contact information and a brief description. Organizations can also hold online elections, display public documents and forms and even store photos online, McNaughton said.
“This is an amazing resource for all organizations on campus. This site is much more accessible than Blackboard Organizations,” McNaughton said. “You don’t need to be a member of the NDSU community to search organizations and find more information about them. Anyone … can go to the MyNDSU site and search through all of the organizations on campus.”
Besides organizational information, there is also a section for upcoming campus events. Organizations post their events with date, time and location information and also list perks of attending the event, like free stuff, free food or credit.
Students can search events based on date, theme, categories and perks. In addition to events, students can navigate another section that includes latest campus news.
Each student has their own profile to help track their event history, membership history, experiences, service hours and involvement transcript. Another aspect of the profile is that they are customizable.
Students can upload a profile picture, write in their preferred first name, add their demographics and links to their social media profiles like LinkedIn and Facebook. Students can also choose if their contact information is public to other MyNDSU users or private to themselves.
“A group of individuals from across campus came together to review options for an online communication system that could help student engagement on campus,” McNaughton said. “After reviewing many options, the group decided that CollegiateLink, through Campus Labs, was the best option for NDSU.”
Assistant Director of Campus Activities Kim Bruemmer, Director of Assessment Jeremy Penn and graduate student Seth Bisbee presented the proposal of the site to the Impact Review Committee after applying for a grant. According to McNaughton, the committee liked the presentation and granted them $53,000 to launch the platform on campus.
More information about the website can be found at http://myndsu.ndsu.edu. New student visitors to the site will have to log in. The same information used to log into Campus Connection can be used to log into MyNDSU.