What is ODU Connect?

ODU Connect is a web based portal designed to facilitate the communications between any organization and Old Dominion University. With ODU Connect, Old Dominion University students can post their needs for volunteer opportunities, internships, and class projects that need a sponsor organization.

ODU Connect -third

ODU Connect -third

The Problem

Old Dominion University lacks an innovative and effective means of visualizing and coordinating external efforts with organizations, thus hindering new partnerships, projects, and inspiring opportunities.

  • ODU lacks a medium for which it can document volunteer efforts and sponsorships, which would mutually benefit organizations looking for interns and partnerships.

  • ODU already has Helper Helper, a program where students can find and track volunteer opportunities, but only displays individual statistics for the user and overall statistics for ODU, not how the event overall impact of the chosen organization.

  • Helper Helper is organization oriented, where organizations can post their needs, but does not serve students by advertising their needs to organizations that are interested in helping. Organizations lack a satisfactory way to display their partnership and their impact on ODU students searching for internships and projects with real-world applications.

  • Current means of communication between organizations and ODU are time consuming and archaic because there is no central communication hub between ODU faculty and organization employees to handle basic tasks, such as asking for project ideas or searching for volunteer event opportunities.

The Solution

ODU Connect, an innovative web-based portal designed to provide a connection visualize collaboration between ODU and any organization.

  • The proposed medium, ODU Connect, serves as a communication hub between ODU and organizations as a web portal, where both ODU and organizations can collaborate on projects better suited to their needs.

  • ODU Connect brings all organizations to one central location to search for ways they can directly affect ODU because all the opportunities on ODU Connect represent a student in need of an internship, grad project, or seeking a mentor.

  • By using ODU Connect, students and faculty have a way to share their needs and advertise opportunities for outside organizations to help and get direct responses from industry leaders looking to make a difference.

  • ODU Connect serves as a way to visualize student needs, where balloons symbolize the unfulfilled student request, which pop once an opportunity has been claimed by an organization. For example, a student would post that they are searching for a computer science oriented internship, and an organization would fulfil the request by sponsoring an internship opportunity.

  • With ODU Connect, the old way of communication through phone calls and emails goes away, replaced instead by a series of notifications and feedback, automated by the portal itself, based off of key word algorithms that notify users based on their settings.