By Barb Kowal, CoSIDA Director of External Affairs
Note: Want to join our organization? If you are not a current 2015-16 CoSIDA member, you can sign up for membership HERE. Only current members can: nominate and vote for Academic All-America® honors; join the CoSIDAConnect online community; serve on CoSIDA committees; receive membership convention registration rates; apply for CoSIDA convention grants, CoSIDA member-child scholarship, and more.
Today, Tuesday, Jan. 26, CoSIDA introduces its new member online community platform - CoSIDAConnect - as we create a place for our current members to connect, engage, network, share and access new ideas. This is CoSIDA's newest initiative to support continuous professional development opportunities for our members.
In this 24/7 communication world, our CoSIDAConnect community platform is designed to help you connect with each other and with CoSIDA staff any time of the day or night, from anywhere and on any device. We saw the need to pull our diverse community together and help everyone create and develop new insights and knowledge while networking and building new professional relationships with colleagues and peers.
On the CoSIDAConnect open forum page, we invite you to login and join the conversation! Under Latest Discusions tab (click on "More" button), you will see messages from CoSIDA president Judy Willson (Mountain West Conference) and CoSIDA Executive Director Doug Vance welcoming you to our new community.
CoSIDA's Director of Membership Engagement Laurie Bollig has posted an important and extensive CoSIDACONNECT HELP GUIDE as you access this new community. Contact Laurie (lauriebollig@cosida.com) with any questions as you navigate around the site.
Since CoSIDAConnect members will receive email notifications about new discussions and information, we know that each organization has email filters/spam filters in place. In order to deliver CoSIDAConnect emails to your inbox, please review the "CoSIDACONNECT EMAIL WHITELISTING INSTRUCTIONS" document. Contact Barb Kowal, CoSIDA Director of External Affairs (barbkowal@cosida.com) with any email whitelisting questions.
You can always sign into CoSIDAConnect from our CoSIDA.com main page - just access the community via this "CoSIDA Connect" button found here:
there will be a CoSIDAConnect mobile app, to be introduced in February.
• the community has a responsive design so it is mobile-friendly
• any current 2015-16 CoSIDA member can post a blog or a best practice at any time in the Open Forum section of the site and in the communities that they are signed into.
• a unified login password - members sign into CoSIDAConnect with their work email address and use the same password they use to log into
CoSIDA.com for membership purchase, Academic All-America nominations/voting, other award nominations, etc.
• the CoSIDAConnect community mirrors a LinkedIn experience; members will have access to the member directory to easily connect with colleagues and peers.
• members set their own profile and preferences; your basic information is pulled from the CoSIDA.com membership database; you can reset and update your profile (see the HELP GUIDE link, above)
• members may connect their profile with various social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
How do you stay connected if you are not active each day?
Anytime someone posts or replies to a question/discussion topic in the CoSIDAConnect open forum, an email will be sent to the entire membership through a daily digest email.
Daily emails/weekly emails from the community: You may opt to receive a consolidated weekly email instead of a daily email; again, those instructions are in the HELP GUIDE above. All members are autosubscribed to a daily digest email to start. All preferences, including communication frequency, can be accessed and edited via ‘My Account’ under your Community profile.
Welcome to CoSIDAConnect and we hope to hear from you soon on our new platform!