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Online Advising - Two Models
Introduction As community colleges create ways of providing quicker, better and more convenient access to their educational services, student support services such as enrollment, advising and counseling find themselves facing the same challenges. How can students enroll for classes from a distance? How can they get accurate information on college policies and procedures from a distance? How can they get sound academic and career advice from a distance? Several community colleges have taken up this challenge and are approaching this task in a variety of ways. This article will provide an overview of two distinct but complimentary approaches to providing online advising/counseling services to prospective students, classroom students and distance education students by San Francisco City College and Rio Hondo College. San Francisco City College The technology involved with Online Advising at CCSF simply uses e-mail. An ADVISOR@CCSF.ORG e-mail account is established and marketed in the Class Schedule and College Web site. Specific counselors are assigned to check this inbox daily, seven days a week. Liaisons with other key offices and departments, such as Admissions and Records, Foreign Students Admissions, Financial Aid and some major departments have been established. Staff from those units are designated to handle questions that they are in a better position to answer. The Online Advisor answers the majority of the questions and occasionally refers questions to those units. The tone of the response is consciously polite and encouraging. The maximum turn-around time is forty-eight hours with the desired target being twenty-four hours. The benefits to the public and the students are obvious. They can ask just about any question about CCSF and get an individualized answer. They do not have to be referred from office to office, and sometimes to the wrong office. They do not have to take time out to come on campus to seek out this information, nor are they limited by office hours. They get a consistently friendly and encouraging tone in the replies. Students are invited to make an appointment to talk with a counselor if their questions require additional information from them as well as more discussions. This service has been very successful judging by the feedback sent in by users of this service and by the number of e-mails that have been received. The Online Advisor receives between three hundred to a thousand e-mails a month, the latter during the peak period, which is about two months before and one month after the beginning of a semester. The largest number of inquiries, 50 percent, is about enrollment (e.g. "When do I take the placement test for enrolling in the Fall?" or "I sent in my application three weeks ago and have not heard from anyone.") The second largest number of inquiries, 35 percent, is curriculum or academic in nature (e.g. "Can I take CHEM 101 at CCSF to satisfy my SFSU requirement?" or "I want to get a Computer Networking Certificate. What courses should I take?"). The number for the rest of the inquiries break out into Foreign Students (6 percent), Policies and Procedures (5 percent) and Miscellaneous (4 percent). What’s the future for Online Advising at City College of San Francisco? One goal is to get more counselors involved. Technologically, we want to integrate it with the College Web site and automate responses to some of the standard questions. Rio Hondo College An online counseling service as defined by RHC counselors involves the process by which academic and career information and resources are disseminated to students online. Although much of what counselors do can be done online, RHC online counselors have recognized that there are limits in terms of the depth to which online counseling can take place. They have found themselves using a combination of online and telephone conferencing modes to provide a more comprehensive "counseling session" experience for students at remote sites. Online counseling at RHC supports not just Virtual College students but on-campus students as well. Although all counselors at RHC can perform online counseling as part of their load, currently, five counselors are assigned on an hourly basis to the Virtual College as online counselors. The role of the online counselors includes both responding to inquiries from Virtual College students and to supporting Virtual College faculty retention efforts. Students access online counseling services at RHC through the college Web site. Once a student clicks into the Online Counseling link, he/she is asked to complete a form which is used to screen student inquiries. The forms are directed to one counselor who screens and distributes the forms to one of the online counselors. This process helps to keep the workload of each counselor balanced and to alleviate the problem of duplicate inquiries going to several counselors. Turnaround time for responding to inquiries is between 24 and 48 hours. RHC counselors respond to hundreds of student inquiries each semester and find that, on average, they engage in 3 exchanges per inquiry. Among the many lessons we have learned from our experiences with online counseling are that there is a need for this type of service and that students do find the service useful and convenient. We have also found that to compose a thoughtful, accurate and comprehensive response to a student inquiry requires more work and research than a face-to-face session. Most importantly, we have found that being online counselors has increased our accessibility to students and effectiveness as counselors. |
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