Advising Online Learners

(Disclaimer - just about all content is copied directly from the cited website)

Academic Advising

Overview with links

Steele, G. (2005). Distance advising. Retrieved -11/30/09 from the NACADA Clearinghouse of Academic Advising Resources Web site: http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/AdvisingIssues/adv_distance.htm.

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Choosing the best technology for the job

http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/eo/dist1.html

*I would expand this list to include Web 2.0 and emerging technologies such as IM, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, Lecture Capture, Desktop Video Conferencing (Elluminate), Ning, Google Apps etc - always focusing on which technology best accomplishes the goals of the advising session.

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Using IM in Advising

Instant messaging (IM) is already in use in many higher education settings and for several different purposes. In light of IM as a flexible, opportunistic, and personal CMC, here are some ideas on both current uses of IM in advising and new ideas to try.  This list is by no means exhaustive:

Advisor contact with other professional staff

• Quick advisor-to-advisor conversation - in our unit, an internal IM system (synchronous communication) has allowed our receptionist to announce a student's arrival or quickly find someone (presence information) for an appointment or telephone call.
• Consistency of advising information between offices - IM is especially helpful in a larger advising network system because it allows advisors from various locations to contact each other quickly to verify information, give other advisors a heads up on referrals, or just to keep in touch. In smaller settings, IM could be shared between faculty and professional advisors.
• Interrupting busy administrators without interrupting them - deans, department heads, advising directors, etc. may have time-sensitive information and/or answers advisors need when working with students.  They may be on the phone or in meetings, and IM can be used to make them aware of the need for information/answers without directly interrupting the flow of their interactions (language under the radar). 
• Project planning - we have even conducted NACADA business with colleagues across the country via IM (place-independent, multitasking).

Student initiates contact with an advisor

• Intake or quick questions with students - a current popular approach has been to have an advisor assigned to answer IM questions within specific virtual "walk-in" hours. Given what we know of presence information and that IM is viewed opportunistically, perhaps rotating times which can be modified on the fly based on advisor availability would work just as well; if the walk-in advisor screenname was on students' buddy lists, they would know when the advisor was available based on presence information.   
• Accessing a student's assigned advisor - advisors can include their IM screenname on their advising syllabi, Web pages, business cards, Facebook profiles, etc. Because of presence information, away messages, and the opportunistic nature of IM, students can know when their advisor is online and free to talk, when their advisor is online but busy, and when their advisor is not online. Even if an advisor forgets to post an away message and would not be able to respond to an IM or would take time to respond, student IM usage patterns would suggest they would not necessarily be offended; students assume multitasking is occurring during IM use, and those other tasks may have precluded the ability to respond to the IM. 
• Advising chatterbots - according to Wikipedia, "a chatterbot is a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods." SmarterChild is an example of an AOL Instant Messenger chatterbot with which anyone can have a quasi-conversation, but it is primarily useful for disseminating factual information. A techno-savvy advisor could design an advising chatterbot for students to IM for answers to simple advising informational questions (ex. when the drop/add period ends).

Advisor initiates contact with student

• Outreach with at-risk students - if a student does not show up for an advising appointment, the advisor could check to see if the student is online and send a quick "What happened? Is everything alright?" If the advisor does not have the student's screenname, the IM could still be sent to the student as a text message if a cell phone number was on record.
• Social pressure to stay on task - there are some students who benefit from regular meetings to help them with time management; some first-year seminars even require students to journal their time.  It might be worth becoming IM buddies with such students, and asking them to use their away messages to document how they are spending their time.
• A kinder, gentler, more personal electronic newsletter - for universities who send announcements to students via email, an alternative or additional way to introduce information to students' consciousnesses would be for an advisor to post information and/or links to information in her/his away messages (ex. "access this Web site: http://example.url.edu to set up an appointment with me").

Conclusion

Our goal in providing the information in this article is to put the horse before the cart -- what you should research and consider BEFORE diving in to this relatively new communication modality with students and colleagues -- as well as some ideas for how you might attempt to use this medium. We end with a few practical logistical considerations to consider if you decide to implement IM use in your own advising setting:

• Develop your personal or unit philosophy about using this form of communication either with colleagues or students. In other words, think through the possible pros and cons BEFORE getting started.
• Determine who you will share your screenname with and/or how you will "collect" screennames from students or colleagues. Will you email your screenname to those you want to IM thus allowing them to decide if they want to IM you? (They can respond by IM'ing you or by simply sending you their screenname -- or not!) Will you pilot this with a sub-set of colleagues or students?
• Establish parameters in terms of your own availability to students and the type of discussions that will be permitted.
• Set boundaries concerning writing styles if that is important to you. Will you accept abbreviations like lol (laugh out loud), misspellings, and no punctuation, or would you prefer a more formalized writing format?
• Decide how to manage the documenting of your IM conversations if that is required at your institution. You can copy and paste entire conversations or you can paraphrase them depending on your own record keeping system.
• In our experience using IM with advisees, we do find it necessary to ask the student to come in to talk in person if the discussion is too complex for IM or free time is short.  However, there are also times where all immediate business with the student can be concluded via this format. Perhaps examples of successful IM advising sessions could be shared and discussed with colleagues.
• Advisors who use IM in their personal lives may wish to have a different screenname for advising purposes to keep the two uses separate and more easily manageable. Relatedly, advisors could recommend that students do the same, but this may erode students' natural use of this medium.
• Consider security and confidentiality issues. How will you identify who you are IM'ing? We simply ask "Who is this?" if we don't remember the screenname. You may not wish to disclose information over this medium, but what about discussing confidential issues disclosed to YOU via IM?
• Experiment with it. You can download most IM software packages from the Internet for free. AOL Instant Messanger (AIM) seems to be the most popular package used by students and can be downloaded at this site: www.aol.com.

The take-away big idea is that if we try to force advisees to communicate with us using a new technology within a set of rules and time constraints that are at odds with the functionality of the new medium, then we risk nullifying the very affordances and uniqueness that make it a potentially powerful new way to connect with advisees.  Working effectively with such a new technology can be a nuanced task for some advisors.  It may seem simple at first glance, because the technology is not something students are consciously thinking about, but it is much like learning a new language (Prensky, 2001). Students have grown up with IM, so their use of it is naturally sophisticated and fluid. Those of us who did not grow up speaking IM need to consciously and systematically learn it.  In other words, we do not need to change what we want to say to students, just how we say it.

http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/AdvisingIssues/Instant-Messaging.htm

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Using Facebook in Advising

Advising Without Walls: An Introduction to Facebook as an Advising Tool
http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/AAT/NW30_1.htm#10

Julie Traxler, Rutgers University

Virginia Gordon (1992) advocated using the telephone as an advising tool, noting that "adviser and student contacts happen in as many settings as many times as the student's needs and the institution's calendar dictate" (p. 63). Since then, Web-based technology has expanded where and how advisors can connect with their students. Media articles have made much of the new phenomenon of the social networking site Facebook (www.facebook.com), concentrating particularly on privacy, security concerns and bad behavior (Bugeja, 2006; Finder, 2006; Mullin, 2006). With over 10 million users across 40,000 college, high school and work-based networks, Facebook is clearly a large part of students' lives and their connection to our campuses. Few discussions, however, have included how advisors can use Facebook as a tool to enhance advising efforts and the advisor-student relationship.

 Serendipitously, Facebook was launched in 2004, coinciding with the publication of advising research that reinforced what many of us suspected all along: students are more concerned with advisor style, including the willingness to develop a relationship, than with specific advising style (Mottarella, Fritzsche & Cerabino, 2004). In 2005, students who were tickled by my questions about Facebook became my guides to the site. When they showed me that new students who had not even registered for classes had created Facebook profiles, I began to wonder how the site might actually expand traditional advising efforts. Below are examples of how I and other advisors have begun to use Facebook and its features to inform, organize, educate and connect with students.

Inform . Facebook offers two direct profile-to-profile communication options: My Messages for private conversations and The Wall for public postings. I use Messages like email to answer questions about requirements or request that students come see me. I find that students respond more quickly because they check Facebook more frequently than their email accounts. Wall messages are public, so they are useful for quick reminders. One new student posted a Status update saying she was feeling overwhelmed by college, so I wrote on her Wall to ask how things were going. We continued the conversation face-to-face, but Facebook had given me access to information about her feelings and an easy way to connect.

My Events is a free option for advertising advising programs, like our recent "How to Succeed in Business.without a Business Major" panel. Events can be sent as invitations to students in my friendship network and are open to all students browsing for campus events. A new Flyers option is not free, but at $5 for 10,000 postings, costs less than ads in many campus newspapers. Online flyers post along the left side of Facebook pages and can celebrate a birthday, advertise a program, or announce the campus-wide launch of a degree audit program.

Organize . Facebook's Groups function allows anyone to organize participants by a common experience, association or interest. A Group listing includes information about the group, upcoming events, access to discussion boards, and the ability to message group members. Advisors on my campus organize student groups in Facebook to enhance regular group meetings. For tour guides who meet rarely as a full group, the site allows communication for switching tours and answering difficult questions. On campuses with large groups of distance or nontraditional students, an online group organized by major, career interest, or class could help students connect with each other, get questions answered, and feel more connected to the campus community. Many of our Transition seminars for transfer students organize Facebook groups to help those students settle into a large university community.

Advisors can also take advantage of Groups that emerge spontaneously from student interest. By June, over 500 new students to my campus had created and joined almost 10 different Class of 2010 groups: two months before move-in day! Students were posting questions on message boards about placement testing and class scheduling. Who better to answer these questions than an advisor? I also use the Search function to find student profiles and send details about orientation programs to those who had not registered. In October, I revisited the Class of 2010 groups to post information about academic advising opportunities for spring registration.

Educate. Advisors have an obligation to help educate students about the consequences of what they post online. These conversations come more naturally when students know that their advisor is part of their Facebook community. I wrote to one student after reading an online note detailing in harsh language his argument with a coworker. I sympathized with his frustration but pointed out that his posting was not the face that he wanted to present to the community. He responded well to the message and removed the posting. In fact, advisors' presence online may encourage students to self-censor. If students are concerned about what I may see on their profile, then they may think more intentionally about their postings. Since employers are increasingly viewing students' profiles (Finder, 2006), introspection and self-censorship are important lessons.

Connect. Advisors gain an opportunity from Facebook to know and be known as part of the campus community. Interests and hobbies on the profile link to others who share those interests; many students have mentioned our shared love of a book or movie. Others have written to ask about my research interests or my kids, who often appear in my pictures. One colleague announced her son's birth on her Facebook profile and many students posted congratulations on her Wall . Given the time constraints of many advising sessions, this type of connection and knowledge can serve to enhance the advisor-student relationship, a core component in effective developmental advising.

Technology like Facebook can be a tremendous resource for cash- and time-strapped advisors. The uses described above supplement traditional advising for little to no extra cost, but they greatly expand advisor-student contact by bridging distance and time. Virtual sites will never replace face-to-face advising, but if they enable students to connect with advisors in ways which make us more of a resource, we should not ignore this opportunity to expand our educational mission.

Traxler, J. (2007). Advising without walls: An introduction to Facebook as an advising tool. Academic Advising Today, 30(1) .Retrieved June 18, 2007, from http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/AAT/NW30_1.htm#10.

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List of 2009 Technology in Advising NACADA conference presentations

http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/annualconf/2009/tracks/techadv.htm

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Career Advising

Selecting a college major (General Resources)

Online Resources from the National Career Development Association

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http://associationdatabase.com/aws/NCDA/pt/sp/resources#list_resources_all-R101-NCDA

Career Advising resources from NACADA

http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/clearinghouse/AdvisingIssues/careeradvising.htm

Colleges and organizations with particularly good information describing college majors

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Career Advising Resources from NACADA

http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/Links/Career-Explore.htm

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*Bottom Line - if I was going to use one college for an example of Advising Online students, I would look to Penn State. They have been doing it longer and more comprehensively than any college of which I am aware.

Advising at Penn State http://www.psu.edu/advising/

Penn State Online http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/index.shtml?cid=0706_GOOLR7411_0607

World Campus Advising http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/StudentServices_Advising.shtml

World Campus Career Services http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/StudentServices_CareerServices.shtml