#Higher Education7 discutindo

Join me for Education Trailblazers Summit in Denver, June 24-25

I can’t believe I haven’t posted about this here, of all places, but better late than never.  After hearing that Salesforce’s Education Summit would be virtual this year, I knew I’d miss the in-person energy of gathering with this community. Since I started the original Summit in 2013, before Salesforce took it over in 2014, this event has been especially close to my heart, and I’ve always looked forward to the annual in-person gathering dedicated to the higher ed Salesforce community.  

So this year, my nonprofit, Education Trailblazers Association, decided to step up and create an in-person event for our community. I’m excited to share that Education Trailblazers Summit will take place at the Hyatt Regency Grant Humphreys Mansion in Denver on June 24-25.  

This conference will feature real-world use cases, honest conversations, and a room full of people who truly understand the challenges and opportunities of using Salesforce in higher ed, very much in the spirit of the very first Summit. 

We’ll kick things off on June 24 with pre-conference workshops and a welcome reception, then spend June 25 with a keynote, customer-led sessions, panels, and a closing session with giveaways. 

Of course, we are looking for speakers who have a great story. If you have lessons learned, best practices, or a story to share, submit a session proposal by April 5. We’ll turn-around decisions quickly, so the full workshop and conference agenda will be published shortly thereafter. 

I hope you’ll register. I’m sure you’ll find getting together with peers as valuable as I always have, and I’d sure love to see you there. 

#Higher Education

This made me smile. I found an old box in my office from when I was at Wayne State, and, there were a bunch of files from first Higher Education Summit back on June 25, 2013. Such cool timing with the first Education Trailblazers Summit

- coincidentally also on June 25th - coming up in a few short weeks!  

Hi Trailblazers - 

The Trailblazer Community team is temporarily banning the use of AI-Generated chat technology (or other AI generated text) to answer questions or post in the community. Our goal is to help Trailblazers learn and connect by sharing knowledge and providing guidance. Unfortunately, AI-Generated chat technology can be misleading or wrong, and therefore goes against our values of trusted and authentic peer-based content.

Why are we taking steps to ban the use of AI-Generated chat technology?

Trailblazers have shared with us examples of answers that appear to be generated by AI. While investigating these incidents, we think language from the popular ChatGPT website about the tool’s limitations is particularly relevant:

“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.”

We are working on a Help Article to provide you with more detailed information and will be digging in to learn more about ChatGPT and other similar tools and how they may impact community engagement moving forward. We want to ensure that the community is a place to connect and learn from fellow Trailblazers.

Thank you! We appreciate your commitment to helping our community continue to be a valuable resource to all Trailblazers.

@Kieren Jameson @Juspreet Kaur @Lizzy Roberts @Bhavin Patel @Ian Twamley @Jessica Langston

@Trailblazer Community Cove

@All Community Group Leaders

Hi Trailblazers, 

I'm looking to connect with anyone at a higher education institution who has worked through the data model alignment between Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and Salesforce Education Cloud's Education Data Foundation (EDF). 

Specifically, I'm interested in how others have approached the structural mapping between the two platforms: 

1. Academic Structure Mapping — How have you mapped Campus Solutions' academic hierarchy (Academic Institution, Academic Career, Academic Program, Academic Plan, Sub-Plan) to EDF's core objects? 

2. Data Model Gaps — Where did the two architectures diverge most, and how did you handle it? 

3. Reusable Artifacts — Do you have field mapping documents, data dictionaries, or reference architectures you'd be willing to share or discuss? 

Any experience — full implementation, pilot, or even a mapping exercise that didn't move forward — would be valuable. Happy to take the conversation to DM if you prefer. 

Thanks in advance! 🎓 

#Education Cloud

I’m thrilled to be speaking at the Education Trailblazers Summit!

I’ll be leading sessions on Scratch Orgs and agentic coding development, alongside so many other incredible presenters sharing real‑world, practical Salesforce solutions for Education. 

I’ll also be available throughout the event to answer your burning questions via the 

@Commons Project: Summit Events App and of course talk about how much I love the @Salesforce Commons & Sprint Events.  

Would love to see you there - especially in person! 

📅 June 24–25, 2026 | Denver, CO 

REGISTER HERE!

#Higher Education

Hi everyone, 

We’re exploring best practices around bringing parent information into Salesforce in a higher-ed context so our marketing team can better engage parents via Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Current state / use case:

• When a student applies, they provide parent information (name, email, etc.) as part of the application.
• This data currently creates a relationship record associated with the student in Salesforce (rather than a standalone parent Contact).
• Separately, our marketing team collects parent interest via lead forms, where parents self-identify and submit their own contact information.

What we’re trying to achieve:

• When a parent submits a marketing form, we’d like to:
  • Match them to an existing parent record (if one exists), and associate them to the correct student, or
  • Create a new parent record and associate it to an existing student, or
  • Create both a new parent and a new student record if neither exists.

Challenges we’re running into:

• Duplicate student records are fairly common (as is typical in higher ed).
• A single parent may end up associated to multiple duplicate student records.
• This introduces complexity around:
  • Identifying the “correct” or “winning” student record
  • Preventing over-creation of parent records
  • Maintaining clean, usable data for downstream marketing and engagement

What we’re looking for from the community:

• How are other institutions modeling parents/guardians in Salesforce (Contacts vs. relationships vs. hybrid)?
• What matching strategies have worked well when parents come in through marketing channels?
• How do you handle duplicate students when associating parents?
• Are there governance or architectural patterns you’ve found helpful for balancing marketing needs with data quality?

#Higher Education