Summer Sessions Research: Operations, Student Preferences, and Marketing
November 3, 2008

ABOUT: Summer session administrators make critical decisions regarding marketing, student retention, organizational design, and online courses. This Web conference highlighted selected research findings including:

• Findings and insights from a unique national survey of more than 4,200 summer session students' preferences
  • Some topics included scale, expenditure, and enrollments
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• Benchmarking metrics for summer session operations
  • This part of the presentation delved deeper into areas such as scale (size) of summer session and growth patterns, student audiences served, and financial and operational metrics
    
  
  
• Analysis of effective marketing practices and organizational strategies
  • Another area of discussion was marketing practices (e.g., what channels are preferred by students, what motivates them to enroll), strategies to engage faculty, and implications for new program development