With the pandemic keeping college students out of the classroom and off campus, many institutions are asking themselves, how can we be student-centered if we don’t even know what’s going on with our students? We recently hosted a webinar to share the major challenges we’ve heard students talk about this semester, and ways in which our organizations—Lakeland Community College (Kirtland, OH) and Persistence Plus—have worked individually and in tandem to address those challenges.

Lakeland and Persistence Plus have partnered since 2017 to bolster student success via a marriage of behavioral science, mobile technology, and on-campus efforts. The strength of our partnership allowed us to tap into students’ hidden barriers with the onset of the pandemic and keep their experiences at the center of our interventions and programs. Lakeland has used its human-centered design thinking approach to reach out to students, listen to their concerns, and offer resources. Meanwhile, Persistence Plus has refined its approach to mobile nudging by examining thousands of open-ended responses shared on our platform since March by students at two- and four-year institutions nationwide. There are three major issues that emerged from the students’ responses to nudges: online learning, burnout, and mental health.

Read on to learn Persistence Plus and Lakeland collaborated to support students' wellness during the COVID-19 pandemic.