The Crew digital campus app is a new tool for students to build their Park University experience inside and out of the classroom.

Ben Zibers, director of student engagement, is a Park University alumnus. While attending the school, Zibers found a problem that most students have when it came to building connections with their online classmates.

“When I was here, one of the things that was the most frustrating for me when I was taking online classes, is that I would make connections and I would meet people, and I would be excited about connecting with them and learning together and then after the class was done, I never heard from them again,” Zibers said. “There was no mechanism for me to connect with those folks or for me to help build kind of my internal network.”

Not only does it allow students to build an ever-growing community of connections for when their journey at Park has ended, but Crew also allows them to connect with their fellow classmates throughout their journey.

“It allows students to connect and form study groups,” Zibers said. “It allows them to connect with pages, it allows them to post in areas that we are calling activities or groups, and basically connect with other students to help the kind of the cocurricular or the outside the classroom experience.”

Students are able to connect with people from past classes, can post for help with deciding on courses or textbooks, and can reach out to all of the clubs are organizations that Park has to offer.

Similar to Facebook, there are pages, people and organizations students can follow, a newsfeed and also a live event feed. Students can stay as involved, or not, as they choose to.

“You can connect with whoever you want, or not connect with whoever you want,” Zibers said. “There is a lot of power, a lot of personalization, a lot of options there, and that is kind of one of the features that is the best option, it really does put you in the driver’s seat and lets you easily control and understand information from sources.”

Crew was originally created by the Student Tech Fee Committee, a subset of the PSGA, to house the management of Park University clubs and organizations.

“We have migrated all of our clubs and organizations over to Crew,” Zibers said. “So it’s a place where you can post information, see events, manage a roster, but, in addition, connect with other students. Connect with mentors, or at the same time connect with your fellow classmates.”

Although Crew was originally created to supply students with a means of organizing and accessing clubs and organizations, there are potentially further steps being taken in Crew’s development.

“Our ultimate goal as we start looking at what’s down the line for this product is we would love, no guarantee so I have nothing to announce, but we would love the ability to migrate some of the features that students use in MyPark and migrate it fully over to Crew. So that you have one place that you can do all of your kind of academic online work, and then still have that social aspect,” he said.

Students can access Crew through the App Store or the Google Play store, as well as crew.park.edu.