Sarah Good
The University of California Santa Barbara Office of Student Life is pushing to promote OrgSync, a web platform for organizing registered campus organizations, to all students.
OrgSync (https://orgsync.com/) allows officers and members to communicate with one another. Each organization’s page includes meeting times, a calendar and an events list that everyone can view. Officers can edit these lists in addition to accessing administrative forms, a dues sheet and other helpful tools to help them manage their organizations.
The website allows students to create their own user account and then to choose to create a new club page or join an already established club page.
The features are syncable for all of a user’s clubs. For instance, if a user is part of three different clubs that are registered on OrgSync, that user’s calendar will show the events from all of their clubs.
Events’ to-do lists can also be made. If a club has a major event coming up with many things that need to get done, they can create a master to-do list and assign tasks that members can check off as they do them.
OrgSync makes it simple for students to connect with organizations.
“The average student can browse the different organizations. They can do it by category or by interest, and see what types of campus organizations exist,” says Katya Armistead, Associate Dean of Students of Student Life and Activities. Students can also find organizations by searching.
Different levels of access can be granted for each club’s page so that an administrator has complete control of the club’s page, officers can contribute content and members can view whatever has been made visible to them. While a potentially useful tool for all club members, it is especially designed to make things easier for officers. Instead of having multiple accounts (such as Facebook, Gmail, etc.) to pass down to new leaders every year, OrgSync makes it a simple transition with just a quick change of access granted to new leaders.
It also makes it possible for club leaders to keep important club documents, forms, information and to-do lists all on the account. Anything they want kept private can be hidden so only other officers or only the administrator can see it.
Students can also create an e-portfolio to keep track of and showcase their involvement and achievements on- or off-campus. This includes academics, employment history, recommendations and any relevant documents.
Later this year, OSL will add the co-curricular transcript, which will also allow students to show their involvement more certifiably. Parts of the transcript will require approval from staff and faculty to be considered valid.
In the past year, OSL adopted the platform and focused on establishing its organizations on it before promoting it to all students. Now, OSL is encouraging all students to use OrgSync as well.
“This year we held workshops during Week of Welcome and we got hundreds of students come to them to learn about how to get involved on campus and we rolled out OrgSync,” says Armistead. “We’re going to be doing different advertising campaigns throughout the year, especially when we roll out the co-curricular transcript.”