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[00:00:00] Welcome to the MEFA Pathway Learning Series. My name is HS Dhar and I’m here for MEFA. I serve as the Mefa Pathway Program coordinator. MEFA is the State Authority created in 1982. Committed to helping families plan, save and pay for college now as an EXTENS of MEFA is MEFA Pathway. MEFA Pathway is a free college and career planning platform for students in Massachusetts.

Serving grades six through 12. Let’s get started. This MEFA Pathway Learning series will be talking about utilizing the goals and strategies feature within MEFA [00:01:00] Pathway and how to utilize. This feature to essentially create, um, your own goals and your own strategies. Mefa Pathway is a free college and career planning platform for students in Massachusetts.

Ingrid six through 12, I am on the mefa pathway.org website. I’m going to select, I.

For any first time user, students are encouraged to create an account, but if a student already has an account, they are encouraged to put in their username and password.

So this is the dashboard. Sammy is a seventh grader, [00:02:00] so Sammy is in middle school. I’m going to hover over to goals and strategies, which can be found in the navigation bar in between the digital portfolio and resume builder.

So we know that goals are important, but also what is important is the strategy. So the strategy are steps that students can take to accomplish their goal. So when a student is thinking about the goal that they’re trying to achieve, it’s important to also think about and. And the strategies in mind to accomplish those goals.

Within the Be A Pathway goals and strategies feature, students can notate and create up to three types of goals. There’s academic, there’s career, and there’s personal. [00:03:00] One thing that’s important to also mention is that, uh, students in Mefa Pathway can utilize the goals and strategies to create goals and to create goals and strategies.

But for middle school students especially, any goal that they create can follow them through the upper grades. So, for example, if. This particular student, um, was in the 11th grade and they made goals in middle school. They would be able to see those goals within their goals and strategies page. Students can filter their search, um, or their goals by status type and grade level created.

They can also sort by grade level created. And expected completion, they can also change their view. So maybe students prefer [00:04:00] a list view or a grid view. They can toggle between whichever one, uh, they prefer.

Next is thinking about the actual goal in mind. So how will a student achieve their goals and how are they going to know when they have achieved it and how are they going to make sure they come in and check off when that goal was completed and they can utilize this feature to do that. So I’m going add in a career goal.

So I’m going to select add goal. Here we can see there’s a goal, name, or description. So for example, let’s, this is a career goal. We’ll just put in.[00:05:00]

Now that we have our goal name, the next step would be the strategies. Keeping in mind that the strategies should support the goal. So if you’re the student has a goal of learning Adobe Illustrator, the strategies in mind are the steps that students will take to complete. Goal. So maybe the strategy in this case would be to take an illustrator course

and maybe they wanna also, uh, spend time learning different graphic design techniques.

Next that is important to think about is the expected completion date because again, if a student has a goal of [00:06:00] learning Adobe Illustrator and they put in their strategies, the expected completion date will make students know, okay, my goal is to have learned this by this particular date, and it keeps them on track and also can hold them accountable.

So we’ll put in an expected completion date of 12 25 20 23, and hit save. Before we hit save, one thing that is important to note is just understanding again, the difference between the goals and the strategies and the expected completion date. So we’ll hit save for this particular goal. We can see that um, any goal that is grayed out is, is completed, and any goal that is still colored is, um, has not yet been completed yet.

So we can go back to our goal. [00:07:00] So let’s say that this particular student, um, has learned Adobe Illustrator. We can click edit and let’s say that they. Uh, took that illustrator course, they can check off that the strategy is complete. Maybe they also spent time learning graphic design techniques. We’ll mark that off as well.

And maybe they accomplished this goal already before the deadline, before they put in. When they hope to reach this goal, they can select this checkbox to mark off when the goal has been achieved and hit save.

Now we can see that our goal has gone from, um, open to now, uh, completed. So this can definitely be used in a variety of ways to just make sure that students are keeping in mind not only their, their goals, but also the [00:08:00] steps that they need to take or the strategies. They need to take to accomplish their, their goal.

And this will help students in a variety of ways by thinking about their career, their career goal, a personal goal, and a academic goal, and how they can view their strategies to accomplish each particular goal that they have in mind.

Great. Thank you and have a wonderful day. Thank you for attending this EA Pathway Learning Series. If you have any questions about e, a pathway or you want more, please feel free to email us at [email protected]. Also, you can get in touch with Mefa at 1 804 4 9 6 3 3 2. As always, definitely feel free to follow us on [00:09:00] social media.

Mefa can be found on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. Thank you and have a great day.