Slate Summit Resources

Slate Presents: Accessibility in Slate and Best Practices

Presented by Carnegie’s Nick Porcella, alongside Darlene Toedter of Minnesota Carlson.
 
Accessibility is essential to creating digital experiences that work for every user. In this session, we’ll walk through practical best practices for improving accessibility across Slate, including Deliver, Forms, Portals, media, hyperlinks, alt text, color contrast, target sizes, screen readers, and accessibility QA tools. You’ll also see examples of common accessibility issues in Slate and how to address them with simple, actionable fixes.

Download the slide deck.

Start with Strategy: Decisions That Make or Break Your Student Success Build

Presented by Carnegie’s Jessica Bittner and Allison Beebie, alongside Hannah Tolliver of Kettering University, Audra Taylor of Georgia Southern University, and Rusty Martel of Mount Royal University.

Student Success implementations start long before you touch configurations. In this interactive panel moderated by Carnegie Higher Ed, leaders from three institutions share the strategy decisions that made or broke their builds: assembling the right project team, earning campus buy-in, choosing what processes to move into Slate, and defining governance and long-term ownership. You’ll hear perspectives from a large public merger context, a smaller STEM-focused institution, and a mid-sized Canadian university sharing an instance with admissions. Bring your questions—this one is designed for discussion and practical takeaways.

The webinar recording and slide deck will be available soon.

From Fragmented to Fully Integrated: Reimagining New Student Orientation

Presented by Carnegie’s Dylan Schechtel, alongside Mark Ledoux and Corey Stamco of Kent State University.

Kent State reimagined New Student Orientation by consolidating multiple legacy systems into Slate. Using application-scoped events and a dynamic event template, we built a scalable orientation experience for first-year, transfer, and international students. The rebuild brought orientation into the admissions portal with dynamic next steps, placement testing, surveys, and fee payments, while related events supported academic advising. We’ll share the internal and student-facing portals and the communication strategy that boosted self-service and engagement. The result: higher show rates, better testing completion, and less admin lift—an end-to-end orientation experience in Slate.

The webinar recording and slide deck will be available soon.

Departments and Dragons: Implementing Slate Across the Decentralized Realms

Presented by Carnegie’s Ryan Walsh, alongside Heather Lefebvre of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Standalone Programs. 

At many institutions, graduate admissions is decentralized at the school or college level—but at MIT, it’s decentralized by department. Learn how one small team implemented Slate as a centralized platform for nearly 50 departments and 100+ graduate programs, each with unique needs and deadlines. This session shares tips and tricks on challenges they faced and solutions they developed to realign the oft-chaotic reality of decentralization into a more consistent, streamlined, and approachable experience for departmental users and applicants across the “realms” (and Realms) of MIT. Level up your own implementation with practical strategies for collaboration, support, and sustainable project management.

The webinar recording and slide deck will be available soon.

Behind the Music: The Hidden Rules Powering Your Instance

Presented by Carnegie’s Nina Lifshey and Darian Quinn, alongside Drew Griffin of Rockhurst University.
 
Is your Slate instance running slow? Have the rules… undone your manual fixes… again? Join us for a deep dive into all things rules. We’ll walk through building an efficient, evergreen rules structure, including audits, health checks, exclusivity groups, and ways to reduce redundancy. We’ll also talk about how to approach converting rules to Configurable Joins so your logic is easier to maintain and your instance is less fragile. Come ready to get your rules house in order.

The webinar recording and slide deck will be available soon.