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Cyber Adviser: High-Tech, High-Touch Advising
In its move from prescriptive to developmental advising methods,
Valencia needed to switch to a new paradigm. Prescriptive advising is
the usual method of "prescribing" courses for students: telling them
what to take in the upcoming semester. Developmental advising helps
students address the overall purposes of higher education and their
goals in life. This is a broader discussion than prescriptive advising.
Research shows that meaningful student contact with faculty and staff
improves student success. Here we are creating an advising alliance
among faculty, students and advisers.
Find a Need and Fill It!
As Valencia moves from prescriptive to developmental advising, the
problem of limited financial and personnel resources becomes more
apparent. The student-to-adviser ratio at Valencia is about 2,000:1 and
there are no funds to hire more advisers. A solution was needed to
provide more advisement services to our students.
Solution? Have faculty provide some advising and have students take
part in their own course planning, in addition to the advising services
provided by the Student Services staff. Because both faculty and
students have limited backgrounds for these tasks, Cyber Adviser was
developed as a way to make the job as painless as possible for them.
How Traditional Advising Works
In the usual advising scenario a student makes an appointment with an
adviser. The adviser asks what the student wants to accomplish at
Valencia Community College. If the student wants to continue his or her
education at a university, then the adviser refers to the transfer manual
for the desired university. Transfer manuals delineate which courses
should be taken at Valencia in order to be sure that these courses are
compatible with the student’s baccalaureate goals. This would work in
an ideal world.
The world, however, is rarely ideal. Sometimes exact course matches
cannot be found in Valencia’s catalog. Therefore, the closest acceptable
course must be identified. Sometimes there is no equivalent course at all.
You can imagine how tedious this searching can be ö especially when
you need to deal with thousands of students.
Sometimes they don’t want to see an adviser. Some students do their
course planning in the cafeteria with recommendations provided by their
peers or their gut feelings. Unfortunately, many cannot (or will not) plan
their courses beyond the next semester. Students usually do not have
transfer manuals from the universities they wish to attend and the
limited copies at Valencia are not readily available to them. Therefore,
they may not have the data they need to efficiently plan their courses at
Valencia.
