Jameson Champion | Sept. 9, 2020 11:59 a.m.
Editor-in-Chief
Starting this fall semester, Florida Southern College has made sweeping changes to how campus organizations handle events with the reintroduction of the school’s Passport Program.
FSC’s Passport Program was introduced during the spring semester of 2017 as a method of increasing student engagement with extracurricular activities around campus. The program mandated that students needed to attend an event in multiple categories over the school year or pay a fine for each unfilled point at the end of the school year.
The original Passport Program was culled during the COVID-19 pandemic as students went virtual and campus events were halted as a way to curb infections rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. As students began a slow return to campus during the 2020 school year, the program was not re-implemented.
This reintroduction coincides with the ending of the last of the FSCares policies put in place during the fall of 2020 and going into the spring of 2022.
According to a student handbook for the new system, rather than creating penalties for students who do not attend events across campus, this new incentive-based approach to the passport will involve giving prizes to students who are active in the campus community. Prizes go as small as water bottles up to the highest tier giving eligible students better housing numbers during the next school year.
The reintroduction of the Passport program, using a new, incentive-based approach coincides with another change to how FSC is handling campus activities: the integration of CampusLabs’ Corq app for on-campus events.
One of the primary uses of Corq is replacing the need to swipe into events using a student ID card. Using Corq, attendees can access a QR code that can be scanned by those running the events without need for the tablets that were used for swiping-in up to now.
“I think it’s a great addition to our campus life,” Association of Campus Entertainment President, Skippy Paquette said. “The Corq app has made the check in process at all of our events more mainstream and made all those pesky lines move substantially faster.”
The Corq app is also integrated with Engage, CampusLabs’ event-planning application used by FSC. All events placed on Engage can also be viewed by students via Corq, including all information related to the event. Integration with Engage also means that a number of other useful features have been made available at events.
“[Corq] allows us to send out emails to all of our attendees for surveying and raffling purposes super easily…” Paquette said.
Signing into events via Corq is how points are earned in the new Passport Program. When scanned-in, students who attend events that are eligible for passport points will earn 10 points per event. Bonus points are applied for Convocation events, attending an event in each category, and events the Center of Student Involvement have decided to assign bonus points to.
Event categories include: fine arts, health and wellness, service and diversity, pathways to profession, learning beyond the classroom and school pride. Points will only be earned via checking-in to eligible events and, once earned, will not carry over between school years.
The program is also not automatic, students must keep track of points earned and contact the Passport Program in order to collect prizes due to them.
