Learning for Success: An Online Financial Aid Training Module for Student Services Staff at Kauai Community College

Abstract

A new learning module on financial aid basics has been developed for student services staff, namely academic counselors and other mentors at Kauai Community College. Participants were existing student services staff along with other faculty and staff at the college and were recruited from informational flyers, face-to-face inquiries, and via email. A pretest and posttest was given to the participants along with a post-unit survey to gauge satisfaction. The study was intended to be completely asynchronous and used the learning management system Canvas. Content was designed to be scaffolded and chunked into three modules, while also using multimedia tools to enhance the learning experience. Results of this study showed that the training module increased subjects’ knowledge of financial aid basics as shown in the posttest results. Expectations were that this extra knowledge will increase cross-departmental communication and training, efficiency for information dissemination to the student, increase student satisfaction with the college, and increase retention and graduation rates.