Alright, let's get started. Hi everyone, and thanks for joining us today for this product spotlight focused on our Experience Hub. My name is Morgan Wahlberg, and I'm the Vice President of Campus Partnerships here at PeopleGrove. Joining me today is Parav Sarendra, our Director of Product Management. Parav leads the development of our Experience Hub platform, and in a few minutes he'll walk us through a live demo so you can see it in action. But first, we're going to spend a few minutes talking about why experiential learning has become such a major focus across higher education and how institutions are working to scale those opportunities across campus. Then we'll take a look at the Experience Hub and how it helps bring those programs together in a way that's easier for students to navigate and also easier for institutions to manage. Then, of course, we'll have some time for audience Q&A, which is highly encouraged. We really want to hear from you. You can drop your questions in the Q&A function here on Zoom, and we'll try to get to as many as we can before the close of the webinar. We've got thirty minutes, so we're going to do our best with that. The last piece of housekeeping information is that this webinar is being recorded, and the recording will be shared with all registrants. So don't worry if you miss anything—you'll be able to catch up on playback or share it with fellow team members when we send that recording. So let's dive in. Across higher education right now, we're seeing a pretty clear shift in how both students and institutions think about value. Students increasingly arrive on campus asking what I would call a very practical question: How will this help me succeed after graduation? Career outcomes have become one of the top priorities for students and families, and employers on their end are placing more emphasis on graduates who can demonstrate real skills and applied experience. Recent research from NACE shows that students who participate in experiential learning report stronger early career outcomes. They see faster career progression, higher career satisfaction, stronger professional networks, and they average about $15,000 higher salaries than their peers who did not have those experiences. So the main takeaway here is that experiential learning is no longer just an enhancement to the academic experience. It's really becoming a core part of how institutions prepare students for the workforce. Yes, sorry to interrupt you, but I think there's a problem with the screen not being shared. Can you try sharing? No problem. One second. Alright folks, can you see this now? Yes. Excellent. Alright, well thank you. Thank you for bearing with us. It's not a webinar without some level of hiccup, so hopefully we got that over early. But anyway, as I was saying, the takeaway here is that experiential learning is not just an enhancement to the academic experience. It's really a core part of how institutions prepare students for the workforce. The challenge, though, is that most campuses already have a wide range of experiential opportunities. And you might wonder why that causes difficulties. But the problem is that they're often spread across many different parts of the institution. For example: Internships coordinated through the career center Research opportunities within academic departments Service learning programs Leadership initiatives Mentoring programs Many other co-curricular experiences Each of these programs is very valuable on its own, but from the student perspective they can be difficult to discover and navigate. Students often don't know what opportunities exist or where to start. From the institutional side, that fragmentation can make it difficult to coordinate programs, track participation, and demonstrate the overall impact of experiential learning initiatives. We also see an interesting difference between how institutions define value and how students experience it. Institutions tend to focus on things like: Academic rigor Curriculum design Faculty expertise But students often measure value in terms of: Career readiness Real-world experience Return on investment In other words, institutions create value by offering opportunities, but students experience that value when they can find those opportunities, participate in them, and translate them into outcomes. That gap between opportunity and access is really what the Experience Hub is designed to address. At a high level, Experience Hub is a centralized platform that brings experiential learning opportunities together in one place for the entire campus. And I will say, for those of you on this call who currently have a PeopleGrove Engagement Hub on your campus—our flagship product—you should know that the Experience Hub can integrate seamlessly into your existing environment, or it can stand alone depending on your preference. There are a lot of advantages to bringing this functionality into a space that your students are already familiar with and using. I will also mention that we recently did an event with Fordham University, which is a great example of expanding from the Engagement Hub environment to engagement plus experience. But back to the Experience Hub. Instead of students needing to search across multiple departments or websites, the Experience Hub creates a single destination where they can discover opportunities like: Internships Mentorship programs Leadership initiatives Research opportunities Many other experiential learning programs Just as importantly, the platform helps institutions manage and track participation in those experiences. As more schools introduce experiential learning requirements or career readiness initiatives tied to graduation, being able to verify and document participation is becoming increasingly important. The Experience Hub makes that process much easier for faculty and administrators. Another key piece is visibility into impact. Many institutions are doing incredible work in experiential learning, but the data often lives in different offices, systems, or spreadsheets. The Experience Hub brings that information together and provides reporting tools that help institutions understand how students are engaging with opportunities across campus and communicate that impact to leadership, accreditation bodies, and other stakeholders. Finally, the platform also helps students translate those experiences into something meaningful for their careers. Through tools like our co-curricular transcript, which Parav will show you in just a minute, students can capture the experiences they've completed and reflect on the skills and competencies they've developed along the way. Ultimately, our goal is to make it much easier for them to articulate those experiences on a résumé or in an interview. In many ways, the Experience Hub connects the entire lifecycle of experiential learning—from discovering opportunities, to participating in them, to documenting outcomes that matter after graduation. So that's a quick overview of the Experience Hub and the role it can play in supporting experiential learning across campus. But the best way to understand how it works is to see the platform itself. With that, I'm going to hand things over to Parav. He'll walk through the student journey in the platform, show how administrators manage opportunities, and demonstrate how those experiences ultimately show up in the co-curricular transcript. So I'm going to stop sharing and say: Parav, over to you. Thanks, Morgan. Alright, let's get straight to the point in terms of what this experiential learning board—or the end-user experience—looks like. Here's where you will see all the opportunities coming in from your different on-campus systems, off-campus systems, or those added individually. All of these opportunities will be available to students in a single place. As you can see here, we have different types of opportunities as well. For example, we have an undergraduate research opportunity. You can have applications attached to these opportunities in the platform, and students can submit them directly. For example, this is one that I've submitted. You'll also see other opportunities that do not yet have an application submitted, so I can fill that out and send it to the faculty. We also have the ability to report participation for each one of these opportunities in the platform. It's a standardized form where we collect: Organization or supervisor information Start and end dates Skills gained Tasks completed Additional feedback Supporting documents Each participation record can then be validated and approved within the platform. Because we bring all these opportunities together, students can also search using keywords. We also have filters such as: Paid opportunities Unpaid opportunities Opportunity type Location Dates Citizenship requirements We also use a recommendation system. Students can subscribe to interests or areas of interest, and we recommend opportunities based on those preferences. We also have an advanced recommendation engine that considers: Previous searches Platform activity Profile information Academic information This helps recommend opportunities that are more relevant to each student. Students can also manage opportunities by: Adding them to favorites Applying directly Reporting external applications These then appear in their Saved and Applied lists. There's also a Participation list where any opportunity that a student has submitted participation for will appear. So this is the main engine for the Experience Hub in PeopleGrove. We also allow opportunities to be submitted by faculty or students. Those submissions can then be reviewed and published in the platform. Now moving on to how this connects to the co-curricular transcript. As participation data comes in—either through students or external systems—it gets populated into the co-curricular transcript. First, we generate an AI-generated summary, usually around 150–200 words, based on the student's experiences. This summary updates every time a new experience is added. We also highlight: Skills developed Types of experiences completed A timeline of participation Students can also submit experiences directly to their co-curricular transcript, though these must be approved. That's why you might see an experience pending approval. If I am an administrator, I can come in and approve or reject those experiences. A few other helpful tools within Experience Hub include Pathways. This allows institutions to create guided pathways for students with a series of steps. These pathways can be: Linear (completed in order) Non-linear (more flexible) Each step can require different actions, such as: Uploading a file Completing a survey Visiting an external link Submitting a text response Reporting participation in an opportunity Pathways can be short—just a few weeks—or span an entire term. They can even include pathways within pathways, allowing you to structure entire programs. Students can be automatically assigned to pathways based on criteria like: Program Department School Another helpful tool is Groups. Groups function as communities where students can: Join discussions Access shared resources Discover relevant opportunities For example, an Undergraduate Researchers Group could include all undergraduate research opportunities. Administrators have full moderation controls and can manage membership rules. So those are some of the tools that make up the Experience Hub, allowing students to move through the entire experiential learning journey: Discover opportunities Apply for opportunities Complete experiences Submit participation Document outcomes in their co-curricular transcript Now I'll go back to the home page to tie everything together. If your institution has Experience Hub, you'll see widgets on the home page related to experiential learning, including: Recommended opportunities Saved opportunities Applied opportunities Action Items Action Items function like a to-do list for students, helping guide them through the next steps in the platform. Some of these actions are automatically detected. For example, if a student saves an opportunity, that action can automatically complete a task. You can also create badges based on completed actions. At a high level, those are the tools available on the student side and how administrators manage opportunities in the platform. So I'll stop there, and if there are any questions we can go ahead. And back to you, Morgan. Morgan: You're still muted, so we're not able to hear you. Thank you so much. Okay, so we've received some great questions—one in the chat and a few in the Q&A. I'm going to give everyone a couple more minutes to submit questions. Before we jump into those, we're going to launch a quick poll. This poll is intended to help us better understand where institutions are in their experiential learning journey and how we can best support you moving forward. Morgan: You're still muted, so we're not able to hear you. Thank you so much. Okay, so we've gotten some great questions—one in the chat and a few in the Q&A. I'm going to give everybody a couple more minutes to put additional questions in there, and I’ll just say thank you, Parav, for walking us through that. Before we jump into questions, we're going to launch a quick poll. This is intended to help us better understand where institutions are in their experiential learning journey and, honestly, how we can best support you moving forward. You should see it pop up on your screen now. We'd really appreciate your input. Actually, Parav, before we jump into some of the other questions, I’ll start with one that came in related to something you just showed. One of the questions asked how opportunities come into the platform. Is it something administrators have to bulk upload, or are there integration options for teams on campus? For example: A career center managing internships through Handshake A study abroad office using Terra Dotta How do those types of opportunities get into the system? Can you talk a little bit more about that? Parav: Yes, absolutely. The short answer is that we support several different ways of populating opportunities in the platform. The first option is manual entry, where administrators can add opportunities one at a time. However, in most cases institutions are managing opportunities somewhere else already—either in an external system or in spreadsheets. So we also support file uploads, where opportunities can be imported into the platform. Those uploads can be done as a one-time import, or they can be automated on a recurring basis—for example daily, weekly, or multiple times per week. The third option is direct integrations with external systems. For example, with Handshake, we can use their RSS feeds to bring internships, jobs, or other opportunities directly into the Experience Hub. Finally, we also support APIs, which allow institutions to push data directly into the platform from their own systems. So overall, there are four main approaches: Manual entry File uploads Direct integrations APIs That flexibility allows institutions to work with the tools they already have in place. Morgan: Yeah, thanks, Parav. That’s really helpful. I’ll just add one quick point from my side. The goal with Experience Hub is really to be flexible, because as we talked about earlier, experiential learning often involves many different teams across campus. Some teams may not currently use a technology platform at all. For those groups, Experience Hub can provide a place where they can create opportunities, manage applications, and run their entire process. Other teams may already be using specialized tools. For example, Terra Dotta is a great system for study abroad. If those teams want to continue using the tools they already have, that's completely fine. Through integrations, we can simply bring those opportunities into the centralized opportunity board so students can see study abroad opportunities alongside everything else. Then on the back end, participation data can also be brought back into the system after the student completes the experience. So the overall goal is to make the platform flexible and supportive of the existing ecosystem on campus. Alright, let's move on to some of the other questions. I saw that Kevin posted one earlier in the chat. Parav, I think this is a great one for you. Kevin asked: Do all experiences listed by students in their profile need approval from administrators before they appear on a student’s co-curricular transcript? Parav: That’s a great question, Kevin. Yes—if students want an experience to appear on their co-curricular transcript, there is an approval process involved. Students can add experiences to their profile, and we do have a work experience section that can be used within the platform by faculty, alumni, or other users. However, if the student wants that experience to appear on the co-curricular transcript, it must be submitted through the appropriate process and approved. This can happen in two ways: Through an official opportunity in the platform Through a submitted co-curricular experience In both cases, an administrator or reviewer will approve the experience before it appears on the transcript. Morgan: Thanks, Parav. Another question we received—and I think this is a really good one for institutions that are thinking about implementing something like this—is: How do institutions usually get different departments and faculty involved in something like Experience Hub? I’ll start with that one. I will say that implementing a platform like this does involve some level of change management on campus. Experiential learning itself is not new. Many institutions already have programs running in different parts of campus. What we're really doing is helping make those opportunities: Easier for students to discover More visible across campus Easier to manage and track institutionally Most faculty and staff can get behind that idea. Sometimes there is some hesitation around concerns like: Changing existing workflows Adding another system to manage And that's where our integration options become very helpful. Teams can continue using systems that already work well for them, while still contributing opportunities to the broader Experience Hub environment. Another thing I'll mention is that we haven't talked much about our onboarding and implementation process, since we only have about thirty minutes today. But implementation is typically phased. Almost no institution launches with every single department involved at the same time. Instead, we usually work with partners to identify a few key stakeholder groups to start with. Those early groups participate in the initial implementation, and then over time additional teams join as it makes sense for them. This phased approach gives institutions time to: Build awareness Demonstrate value Have conversations internally about adoption And of course, our team works closely with partners throughout that change management process. But thank you for that question. Parav, anything you'd like to add there? Parav: Yes, just to highlight two of the points you mentioned. First, our goal is not to replace existing systems, but to make sure they work together more effectively. Second, we want to help institutions: Increase student participation Reduce manual work Identify opportunities for automation And in cases where programs are still managing opportunities through spreadsheets, this platform provides an opportunity to formalize that data and structure it in a much more scalable way. Morgan: Great. Alright, I’m looking at the time and I see that we still have some really good questions that we didn’t get to. I’m sorry we weren’t able to answer all of them today, but we do want to make sure we get everyone out of here on time. So with that, I just want to thank everyone again for taking time out of your day to join us. We really appreciate the opportunity to share what we’re building and to learn more about the work that you're doing on your campuses. If additional questions come up—either things we didn’t get to today or questions that come to mind after the session—please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re always happy to continue the conversation. With that, thank you again for joining us, and have a wonderful rest of your day.
