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Transcript of LAAP Academic
Advising and Webcast Introduction
Slide:
WCET presents a Webcast Series: Providing Student Services to Distance
Learners
PAT:
Hello, my name is Pat Shea, the assistant
director of WCET and I’m coming to you today from our east coast
office in Summit, New Jersey. I apologize for our delay of a couple
of minutes. We had a little bit of a technical problem but that
seems to be fixed now. So we should be all set. Also joining us
from WCET’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado is my colleague, Sue
Armitage. Hi, Sue.
SUE:
Hello Pat, and everybody in the audience.
I have been making a list to see where people are from. I think
it’s always so exciting. Let me just share with you the States that
I have captured. Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, New Jersey, Ohio,
Utah, lots of folks from Kansas, South Dakota, Colorado, Connecticut,
North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Alaska. I want to say
a special hello to Ron Slaminsky, he’s a newcomer to our webcast
up there in Alaska. So welcome, Ron. We also have folks from Wisconsin,
Maine, Puerto Rico and New Mexico. So, hello everyone. Glad you
could be with us today.
Slide:
LAAP Project Demonstration: Orientation to Academic Advising
PAT:
That’s great. Thanks, Sue. Our special guest
today is Mel Chastain, the Director of Kansas Regents Educational
Communication Center at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
Welcome, Mel.
MEL:
Thanks, Pat. Glad to be here.
SUE:
Okay. I’d like to talk to everyone a little
bit about the technology of this webcast. Please let us know if
you are experienced in the WCET webcast, in the sense of what all
the features are. So please, if you have participated in the webcast,
click on the green “yes” button, in that black bar sort of above
my head. Bottom right hand corner. Click “yes” if you have participated.
Click “no” if you have not participated in a webcast before. And
if there are lots of folks that are new to this, we’ll try to give
you extra pointers about how to use it all.
PAT:
And while those responses are coming in,
I want to make sure that everyone is invited to make comments related
to the presentation in the chat box as we proceed through the presentation
today. Many of you are experts in the field of academic advising
or technology. And this is a good opportunity to share what know
with other attendees. If you experience connectivity problems during
this presentation, please click on the “help” button and send an
e-mail message to tech support. We prefer that you do that rather
than put messages in the chat box because it can be distracting
to our speaker. Also, I want to say a special thank you to Denise
Easton from U Live and Learn. Denise has been wonderful about helping
to sponsor this webcast series so we can bring it to you free of
charge.
SUE:
There’s a handy-dandy calculator
of the yes/no votes in the grey bar at the bottom, so we see that
we have seventeen “yesses” but thirty-two “nos.” So we have lots
more people who are new to the webcast. So let me tell you a few
more things about what you’re looking at. Many of you have found
the chat box — if you are new to this and would like to send
a message, you go to the “send a message” part of the screen at
the very bottom left. Click in there, type your message, hit “enter.”
And that’s what sends it into the chat box so that everybody else
can see. But if you’d like to send a private message to someone,
and that is someone whose name you see listed, you can do it two
ways: you can just click on that person’s name — if you have
IE, not Netscape — and a window will pop up and you can send
a message just to that person. Or, you could go in the black bar
which says “IM” — Instant Message — and do the same
kind of thing there. So if Netscape users have to use that IM feature.
I’d also like to mention a quirk of Internet technology. This webcast
is not a television program where all the contents, voice and visuals
are broadcast in one stream. Instead, all our voice and visual content
is broken up into packets that travels the Internet backbone at
different rates and reassembles on your computer. So, if what you
hear and see don’t match up exactly, please be patient and hopefully,
they will all align shortly.
Slide:
LAAP Project Partners/Deliverables
PAT:
Thanks, Sue, for the technical advice there.
This webcast series is now focussing on our LAAP Project —
“Beyond the Administrative Core: Creating Web-based Student Services
for Online Learners” — which is a project funded by the US
Department of Education. Over the last three months we’ve heard
from a number of the key participants in this LAAP Project. Burnie
Blakeley spoke about scenario building, in July; Mike Tagawa from
Kapi’olani Community College talked about learning support, in August;
and Ellen Waterman talked about their project from Regis University,
in September. And all of those presentations are archived and available
if you’d like to listen to them at a later time.
And over the next few months
we’ll have the other partners in this project. There are four partners
altogether. You should see them there on your screen. Kapi’olani
Community College has about seven thousand students and is one of
seven community colleges in the University of Hawaii ’s system.
Kansas State is a large land grant university with more than twenty
thousand students. Regis University is a private Jesuit institution,
located in Denver, Colorado. It has about ten thousand enrollments
in its School for Professional Studies which was the target audience
for this project. And then, our corporate partner is SCT. So you
can see that these schools are very different in their size, in
their mission and the types of students they serve and it was quite
a challenge for us to figure out how we might work together to create
some new online student services. And we’ll be talking about some
of the solutions today.
There are four deliverables
for this three-year project which ends in December. The first is
a set of commercial solutions for student services developed by
SCT. And Peggi Munkittrick will be making that presentation in November,
here in a webcast. Homegrown Solutions developed by the institutional
partners. A set of guidelines for other campuses developing student
services. And case studies tracking the changes that occur as a
result of implementing new web-based student services.
Slide:
WCET: the Cooperative advancing the effective use of technology
in higher education
And I recognize a number
of WCET members in our audience today. So a special “hello” to them.
But, for those of you who are not familiar with WCET, I just want
to give you a little bit of background. It is a cooperative of higher
education institutions, agencies and non-profit organizations and
corporations involved in distance learning. And our focus is on
advancing the effective use of technology in higher education. And
you can see some more information about some of our activities there
on the screen along with our web address, which I hope you’ll visit
to learn more about WCET. Of particular note is that we have our
annual conference coming up November 6-9 th in Denver. And we will
have a special pre-conference session at that meeting in which we’ll
go over some of the findings and demos of the modules that have
been developed in this LAAP Project. So, there’s still time to register
and I hope you will do that.
Slide:
Online Academic Advising
And now it’s time to tell
you a little more about our guest, Mel Chastain. Mel has been the
Director of the Kansas Regents Educational Communication Center
since 1988. His professional interests focus on telecommunications,
educational research, curriculum design, multimedia, distance learning
and management theory and practice. He has extensive experience
as an educational television producer and director. In addition
to his administrative role, he is also an Associate Professor in
the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State
University. He holds a Master’s Degree in Communicative Arts from
the University of Denver and a Ph.D. in Educational Administation
from Texas A&M University. So, once again now, we’re delighted
to have you here.
MEL:
Well, thanks Pat. Since we were a little
late getting started, we did ask people to tell us something about
their professional responsibilities. And I see several of you have
already done that and we really appreciate that. I think I’d like
to start by saying that I am neither an academic advisor nor a computer
programmer and we’ll let you decide as this thing unfolds, whether
or not that’s a good idea or not. But it was important to us to
find out a little bit more about the backgrounds and professional
experience and interest of the people who are joining us on the
webcast. So we really do appreciate that.
Slide:
Kansas State University: Synopsis
I might start here with telling
you just a little bit about Kansas State University. As Pat has
mentioned, I think the slides will probably get to you a few seconds
before each of our comments, so I won’t insult your intelligence
by reading any of these slides to you but, will instead, just offer
additional comments that might support what you’re reading at the
time.
There, you can see some of
the statistics about Kansas State and give you some sense of who
we are, why we went about things the way we did, look at some of
the tools and approaches we used, and talk a little bit about lessons
learned to this point and whether or not we think it’s all going
to work.
Slide:
Kansas State University: Brief Profile
Let’s take a look now at
some statistics about the University. And while that’s up and you’re
looking at that, I want to say a few words about K-State Online
which is the course management system here at K-State and it’s really
the primary vehicle into which our online academic advising system
has been placed. And it was an easy choice for us because, as you
can see by the numbers there on the screen, so many of our faculty
members and our resident students and virtually all of our distance
students are already familiar with K-State Online. They understand
how that works. It’s sort of our version of WebCT or Blackboard.
So, if you’re familiar with either of those products, you know the
kinds of tools that are represented by K-State Online. So it was
really a natural choice for us as we tried to decide the best vehicle
in which we might place this online academic advising tool.
Slide:
Academic Advising at K-State
As far as we were concerned,
academic advising — of all the different kinds of advising
you can choose to try and do online — was really a no-brainer
for us, even though that’s probably the hardest kind of advising
to try and do online for a couple of reasons. First was that we
thought it was probably the most difficult to tackle. If we could
solve that one we could probably about anything. Or, conversely,
we figured, well if we can’t do this then we probably can’t do any
of the other kinds of online advising of any kind. We’re also fortunate
in having one of the national associations located right here on
campus. And I think, Pat, you had a comment you wanted to make about
that.
PAT:
Well, the National Academic Advising Association
is located there, so if there was any place where this project needed
to start, I think that’s a great place because I believe that Bobby
Flaherty, who’s the Executive Director, has been involved in most
of your meetings. Isn’t that right, Mel?
MEL:
That’s true. And she can give us advice,
of course, from the national perspective. So that helped us a great
deal.
Slide:
At K-State, All Academic Advising is NOT the Same
So, very briefly, let’s try
and move through some additional points here if we can get the slide
to pop up. There it is.
The point we’re trying to
make here is that all academic advising is not the same. You can
see the obvious differences caused by discipline or advisor type.
I’d like to just say a word or two about culture. On our campus
there’s a huge difference, for instance in the amount of expectations
placed upon the student based upon their major. People in Business
Administration and Engineering expect the students to be able to
know what’s expected of them and go ahead and do things on their
own. In some of the phases of Arts and Sciences there’s a little
more willingness on the part of the advisors to provide some help
and some friendly reminders as time goes along. So those are just
some of the differences in advising that we noticed as we got this
whole thing started.
Slide:
Full-time Staff/Faculty Advisor Differences
The big difference, of course,
between full-time staff advisors and faculty advisors are there
for you to look at. I think the main comment we’d want to make with
respect to that is that a full-time advisor really helps students
to find a path which can lead to success and may or may not be within
the initial major that the student initially chose. A faculty advisor
however, because of his or her background obviously, is there to,
first of all, try and help the student decide if that particular
path will lead to success and if not, then there’s a process to
try and get them affiliated or associated with some other advisor
that can help somewhere on down the line.
Slide:
However this project has led us to (at least) one universal truth:
This may look like an obvious
conclusion for many of you, but, believe it or not, we spent an
awful lot of time trying to decide whether or not there is a difference
between resident students and distant learners when it comes to
the process of academic advising. And, of course, on our campus,
as it was pointed out in an earlier slide, about eighty-five percent
of our resident learners are already involved in some form of digital
learning. So we determined, not in our first meeting, but fairly
early on, that there really isn’t any difference between the two.
PAT:
Coming to that conclusion, though, was a
very important decision for this project, I think, Mel. Not only
at Kansas State but also at Kapi’olani and at Regis. Because each
of the grants originally sat in the division of continuing studies
or professional studies, sort of outside the mainstream institution
and, we quickly figured out that whatever solutions we built, they
needed to serve all students in order for them in order for us to
be able to have access to the type of resources that it would take
to build a robust kind of service.
MEL:
That’s for sure.
PAT:
I think that was a very important decision.
MEL:
I think that’s right.
Slide:
In Search of Solutions
The next slide says, “In
Search of Solutions.” I suppose we could call that our lessons learned.
We should point out that the asterisk there on the second bullet
alludes to the fact that we have seventeen different locations,
or something like that, where student data is stored. And many of
them have different administrators and different processes and practices
that affect the way people can either add material or gain access
to the material or the data that’s located there. And we’ll talk
at greater length, here in a minute, about how we tried to resolve
the problem of having data in so many different locations. The pictures
that are mentioned there really eliminated the need for trying to
create dialogue that everyone understands, though definitions are
vitally important. Burnie Blakeley, who presented one of these webcasts
a couple of months ago spent a lot of time talking about definitions
and if we hadn’t spent the painstaking time to describe and define
all the elements that we’re talking about, we really wouldn’t have
been able to move forward very much at all. Finally, we’d make the
comment that a group of academic advisors, in this particular context,
are really not gathered together to do the work, but they’re very
good at reacting to something that we’ve done and letting us know
whether or not it will work. So those are kind of the lessons we’ve
learned.
PAT:
And Mel, when you say, “we’ve done,” you
might want to just talk a little bit about your vision team here
just to give people an understanding on that.
Slide:
The Flow Diagram
MEL:
Well I think, because of the leadership
that we had from WCET, they pointed out to us that it was important
for us to get the administration involved at the highest level so
they could help us to see the big picture and not get us so involved
with the details that we fail to see what was really important about
this — and that’s to serve the student and try a and answer
the student’s questions. So we had the Dean of Students, we had
the Registrar, we had the Vice-Provost for Academic Services and
Technology. We had a lot of people on our vision team that were
very good at, not only seeing what the problem was, but taking the
bigger picture and trying to look at a little broader horizon.
The image that you’re seeing
now — it’s going to be really difficult for you to read it
all in that it’s not our point to try and enable you to read it
— but just to point out that there had to be some kind of
a communication document so that we could respect the differences
in the academic advising process from department to department and
college to college, but, really at the same time, focus on the things
that were similar. So, what you see is, essentially two pages. And
if we had more room we would have stacked up the second page underneath
the first page so it’s just one long column or one long sheet there.
But, what we hope that you can see, is that in the series of bubbles
on the left hand column, those represent the kinds of activities
and initiatives and interactions that are initiated by a student.
The ones on the right hand side are the ones that are initiated
by the advisor. And the items down the middle column are the actual
events or the results. And we got people — it’s probably an
over-simplification — but, we got everybody to agree that
the primary purpose is to get the students into the system, get
them through the system and get them out of the system at the other
end. It’s a lot more sophisticated than that but once we got people
to agree on that, it moved along fairly well. And, Sue, I think
you might be able to help us here because I think we’ve got some
information or a website that, if people do want to see the flow
diagrams and other things that we’re about to present, they can
see them in a format that they can actually read.
SUE:
Indeed. I just put into the chat
box the URL for this particular LAAP Project’s web site. And we
have a very easily readable, excuse me, version of this diagram
flow and other information about the project.
Slide:
Unified Modelling Language
MEL:
Okay. Fine. So that same URL will apply
to several other things you are about to see, including this —
we used unified modelling language or UML to try and help create
as dialogue between the advisors and the programmers who are actually
going to have to write the programming to reach out and find this
data and put it into a format. And I won’t bore you with many details
on this at all because, as I said before, Burnie Blakeley presented
an entire web cast a couple of months ago and that is archived at
the same location. So those of you who are interested in that can
go back and use that. But I can say that without that kind of leadership
and help, it would have been difficult for us to develop that kind
of a bridge between the folks who are needing access to the data
and the folks who are actually trying to write the programming.
SUE:
We have a question. Kate has a question.
Maybe you could tie it back in with the last slide. She wants to
know, “Can you explain what is meant ‘do the work, then let them
correct it?’”
MEL:
Well that simply refers to a comment
I made earlier, particularly when dealing with our academic advisors.
We tried, as a group of fifteen or twenty people, to sit down and
write the scenarios one at a time. And, while we were able to get
that done, it was taking us forty-five minutes to an hour to agree
on the common terms that we could use to describe a typical interaction,
like a student making an arrangement to come in and sit down and
have an evaluation session about his or her progress. That sounds
like a straightforward thing but it’s done in so many different
ways in different colleges, in different departments, that it really
wasn’t working out that way. And we have a total of forty-six or
forty-seven scenarios that describe different interactions between
people and databases. So it really worked out a lot better for us
to just go ahead and write those, after we had done one or two of
them in a group setting, I just sat down one evening, in about five
or six hours and wrote all forty-six of them and sent them around
electronically to our academic advisors and to some other folks
who are on our team and let them respond to that. And they’re, obviously,
very good at that. They’d say, “Yeah, this works just fine in our
college doing it this way,” or “No. It doesn’t work at all.” So
that was the point we were trying to make there.
Slide:
Sample Scenario
And this scenario that you’re
looking at, again, the same URL will get you to a — if you
want to — a location where you can read all forty-six of them.
But the idea behind a scenario was simply that, it forces each of
us to write down, first of all the pre-conditions: what are the
assumptions that people bring to a particular interaction between
an advisor and someone that needs advice? What are the actual interactions
between the people and the databases and then what’s the post-conditions?
In other words: when that interaction is over, what are people able
to do that they weren’t able to do before?
Slide:
Modeling an Approach
So then that brings us then
to an approach. And, as far as we’re concerned, at K-State, the
primary data set that people refer to, tends to be the transcript.
I think Mike Stouffer is participating in this webcast and he’s
very involved with a lot of process at K-State including DARS. And
he would be the first to tell you that there are a huge number of
requests, every single semester, from both students and faculty
members, for copies of the transcript. And I think that’s primarily
because it’s recognized as an official document. Even the transcript
doesn’t show everything the advisor or the student needs, but it
is, as I said, an official document and provides a feeling of security.
We right quick tried to get to a situation that we refer to as the
80-20 issue to try and provide our academic advisors an online system
that would provide answers to eighty percent of the most common
questions that are asked by students and rely on DARS as —
and we’ll talk more about DARS in a minute, but it’s undoubtedly
the most comprehensive compilation of a student progress —
and rely on DARS to handle the other twenty percent. But if we could
get a relatively simple and user-friendly system online that would
take care of that 80-20 process, that would be successful. And,
Pat wanted me to mention the fact that we didn’t just “web-anize”
that — I think that’s Pat’s term — what we already had
but try and make a system that truly did meet the unique needs of
the advisors.
PAT:
So really what you’ve ended up building,
Mel, is a system that helps both students — provides a student
service — but also provides a tool to academic advisors to
provide better service to students. Is that right?
MEL:
That’s right.
Slide:
A Solution... by the Numbers
So, what we’re looking at
now is really a by-the-numbers set and this probably isn’t really
the solution but it’s a set of the questions. And as you’re looking
at those questions, there are two slides to the sequence. I’ll just
mention that the two tricks that were involved, as far as we’re
concerned, were, first of all, getting the database administrators
to agree to allow access to the various data that existed. And,
secondly, getting the academic advisors to agree on what constituted
that eighty percent of the information that’s common to the most
of the kinds of interactions. And as you read through this list
of seven questions you can see that’s really where we were trying
to lead the whole process. We got a little bit of a late start and
I want to make sure to get this wrapped up in time so you can see
the presentation because I think the demonstration will show you
what the result turned out to be.
Slide:
The Answers... by the Numbers
So then, following the same
sets of numbers, as I said earlier, there is data on this campus
in lots of different places. I think it’s probably pretty typical.
Most campuses, for good reason, have data involving various aspects
of the student’s progress, located in various different places.
Most of our information is either located in or gets entered into
DARS which is a degree audit reporting system. It’s a proprietary
system. There is no doubt that it’s an extremely comprehensive compilation.
It does tend to be text only and for some people it can be, if not
confusing, at least somewhat tenuous in trying to scroll through
the huge amount of information that’s there in order to find the
specific answers that you’re looking for. We found that our academic
advisors were making little short handed sheets that they kept in
typical files — paper and pencil style — to kind of
make a shorthand version of that. So our intention, then, was to
try and create something electronically that would duplicate that.
While I’m going through this, I might ask you to just indicate yes
or no if you’re institution is also using DARS. Because it’s occurred
to us that several other people are probably in the same kind of
an institution and has made a choice to use DARS. And this is certainly
not a presentation about DARS but it would be nice to know if there
are kindred spirits out there who are dealing with some of the same
issues that we are. And we see the tally starting to show up there.
SUE:
And if you don’t know, like Vicki, you can
click the yellow question mark button.
MEL:
There you go.
Slide:
The “Common” Academic Advising Data Sets
Now that we’ve gotten this
far, it might be interesting for you to know what the common academic
advising data sets were on the part of the advisors. There was a
great deal of discussion throughout the whole process having to
do with transfer courses of all kinds. And, you know better than
I do that, that causes the most time, effort and human intervention
to try and resolve. I don’t know that there can be an automated
system that’ll ever cover every possibility. That’s really why we
have advisors. But identifying the two main types of transfer courses,
or at least being able to put them in two piles or two columns —
transfer courses accepted that apply to a degree and then transfer
courses in limbo — really was a major breakthrough for us.
SUE:
The results now of your quick polling
question. We have ten people saying “yes” they do use DARS at their
school. Eighteen “no.” And seven aren’t sure.
Slide:
Related Efforts
MEL:
Very good. Well it’s good to know there
are other folks out there using it and, as we said before, there’s
no doubt that it’s an extremely comprehensive system. What we were
trying to do was figure out a way to place some sort of an abbreviated
version of that online so that we could take care of some of the
most common kinds of questions that students and their advisors
would have.
So we talked earlier about
the data set on our campus — that’s the transcript. It was
equally important for us to find a process that would enable the
interaction to take place between advisors and advisees. And on
our campus, obviously, the way that winds up is to use K-State Online,
which is our mechanism for course management on this campus.
Slide:
Summary
So that’s where we are at
this particular point in time. Our natural solution, as we said
earlier on, was K-State Online. That’s a proprietary course management
system developed right here on campus. The overwhelming majority
of our faculty and students are aware of and comfortable with KSOL.
And it was a natural platform in which to place the academic advising
tools. We wanted for it to be just as easy for a student to walk
into an office and sit down and pop up something on the screen and
talk about it face to face with an advisor as it is for somebody
who may be six or eight time zones away to be able to do that either
in real time or asynchronously with an academic advisor. So that’s
kind of the summary as far as where we are right now.
Slide:
Advising Using K-State Online
I’d like to introduce Jennifer
Bambach who is the Multimedia Coordinator in the Division of Continuing
Education here at K-State. And she is one of the people who, not
only develops the tools for the system, but also designs training
modules for those who want to learn how to use it. So, Jennifer,
the floor is yours.
JENNIFER:
Thank you very much, Mel. I’m very happy to be here
and as Mel said, I do training and technical support for K-State
Online and as well as this advising environment that we’ve created
within K-State Online. So I’ve had the privilege of working with
the advisors and getting an idea of how they advise our students.
And, like Mel, I’m not an advisor and I’m not an instructor so a
lot of the experience I have is through those people that I work
with. And I’m actually going to take you through what K-State Online
is and the unique advantages of using K-State Online to communicate
with advisees as an advisor, as well as the way that we took the
information from DARS to put it in a unique report for both the
advisee and the advisor to view.
Slide:
K-State Online Web Site
So one of the first things
that I wanted to go ahead and do is show you what K-State Online
looks like coming into it from the beginning. And K-State Online
is a web application which can be accessed from anywhere. And all
you need is a log-in. And the college here determines who has the
ability to be an advisor and an instructor and a student.
Slide:
K-State Online Course Organizer
And when you come in to K-State
Online and you log-in and you’re authenticated and given permission
to use the system, you’re given a course organizer. And like, Mel,
as he said earlier, the slides may come a little sooner than the
actual narration from me, it is going to be a little off. So what
you’re looking at is the course organizer. And here, this is an
instructor or an advisor would see this type of screen. And this
shows them the courses that they’re involved in or the advising
phases that they’re involved in. Students have a very similar view
that they can go in as well. And, one of the important things is
I created examples — an advising environment or space for
the College of Arts and Sciences. And what you can do from here
is either go in and look at the student view or, also, go into the
tools.
Slide:
K-State Online Student View
And I’m actually going to
walk you through the student view of the advising space so you can
get an idea from the student’s perspective or from the advisee’s
perspective of the different things that they can use to communicate
with their advisor, whether they’re on campus or off campus. The
tool that they have — and I’m just probably going to be a
little bit to read — but, what they’re able to do is the advisor
is able to post content, communicate with a calendar — which
I’ll go into in a little bit — a chat room, a message board,
you can pass files back and forth. You can e-mail the advisor and
the advisor can also e-mail individual students as well as all the
students. And there’s also technical support. We have technical
support here at K-State for all of our students and faculty as well
as advisors at extended hours. So we offer technical support from
eight o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night, Monday through
Saturday and we’re looking at trying to provide 24/7 very shortly
here because of the increased usage. And then the ability to view
an advising report.
PAT:
The students who have access to K-State
Online — there was sort of a question in the chat box —
are these students who have already been admitted? Is that when
they get access to K-State or do you give any students access before
they’re admitted?
JENNIFER:
Right now we are actually, in December, going to a single
sign-on at K-State. And they’re looking if you have — we call
it an EID — if you have the single sign-on that authenticates
you. And you can actually come in as a student, but whether or not
you have access to a course, is really dependent on whether or not
an instructor gives you access to that course. So you can have an
account with K-State Online but, whether or not you have access
to a course is determined on whether or not someone gives you access
to that course.
PAT:
I see. Okay. Thank you.
JENNIFER:
No problem. So why don’t we actually dig into this.
We’re looking actually just to give you an idea of right now, I’m
just going to be showing these screen shots of the actual applications,
but later, we’re going to be posting up on the WCET web site in
the same area where you can get a lot of the information that Mel
had on his slides, a demo where it actually shows you walking through
the application and how you would actually do stuff. Well we’re
just going to be pushing screen shots at you. So that’s something
to keep in mind if you’re more interested in this application.
Slide:
K-State Online Calendar
So, in digging into this,
let’s really take a look at the core communication tools for the
students and the advisors to communicate with each other. One is
the calendar. And in the calendar, this is a way to post reminders.
I’ve put up examples of a job fair that might be of interest. Or
a majors fair, if they haven’t chose a major yet. Or you may want
to place up — just to give a couple of different examples
— last day to drop. Or post appointments for your students
to come in or to meet with you online to discuss what your plan
is or what your schedule is. And you have the ability to go in and
get more detail about these post links and it acts very much like
your calendar that you use whether it’s GroupWise or Outlook or
anything of that sort. It’s a very similar type in the type of appointments
you can make in that. And this is for all students — that
they can view.
Slide:
K-State Online Message Board
Along with the calendar there’s
also different tools like a message board for asynchronous communication.
So you can go in and post messages and view it in threads. A lot
of people use LISTSERVs. This is an alternative to a LISTSERV in
which you can kind of keep a conversation within context. So, if
you’re talking about a specific subject, you would create a thread
for it and you can actually see who’s apply, who’s replying to whom
or at what point in the conversation they’re at. So the examples
that I’ve used is, they want to post their resumes for the job fair.
Or the advisor wants to say that you need to go out and fill out
the application for graduation and for looking at the different
requirements for graduation. Do you need to fill out certain information.
And you can actually go in and view the message and respond to it
and look at, as well, where it is within the conversation. And this
is a way to pass information back and forth while not having to
meet at the same exact time, and create a discussion area.
PAT:
One advisor could post messages,
then, for all advisees at one time?
JENNIFER:
Right. All of the advisees can view this as well as
advisees can post threads too. Can create threads if there were
different things that they needed to know or ask a question that,
maybe, is appropriate for all of the people within this advising
space. That makes it a little clearer.
I’m going to actually jump
back to the student’s page in which they see is their intro page.
Kind of the crux of what we’re talking about is getting the main
data set, which Mel talked about, is the advising report and the
students can access this here and run this report as well. And they
have the ability to change the layout. And I’m going to actually
get into that, a little later, as well as run it. And when I say
run advising report, what the system actually does is it goes out
to our DAR system and runs the DARS report and then pull it back
in and re-formats, it’s a little more complicated than re-format,
because it’s not only going out to DARS, it’s going out to several
of our different systems and pulling the information together and
putting the information together. So going out and touching where
all the data was in those different systems and bringing them all
together.
Slide:
K-State Online Chat Room
And then, the next one is
synchronous communication which is our chat room. And here, it’s
going to come up in a second, but, we’ve pulled in the advising
report and then overlaid the chat box on top of it. And this kind
of shows you a good idea of if I was a distance student and I wanted
to communicate with my advisor, I can bring up the report in my
home — say I’m in Hawaii — that would be a great place
to be — in Hawaii, and my advisor could be here in Kansas
and we could both bring up the same report and then chat back and
forth with each other. So it would be very similar to sitting in
the same office, but, we’re looking at the same information and
we’re communicating in real time with each other about the different
requirements that I would need to be taking or what I would need
to graduate. Or, even to start out.
PAT:
Great. And no long-distance charges.
JENNIFER:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Slide:
K-State Online Advisor View
All right. So now we’re going
to go ahead and kind of move along and look at it now from the advisor
point of view and seeing how you can actually bring all these things
together and make it a true advising environment. And you’re actually
given a lot of different tools. It’s divided into three main areas
with “Help and Information” being the fourth because we all need
help and information at some point in time. And then the main area
as being “Content Management” this is where you would be posting
documents that the students may want to use. So you’re looking at
maybe posting up a Word document for a schedule or how to plan their
semesters out for the rest of their college education. Or maybe
how to use the schedule to find the reference numbers to enroll
in the courses that you want to enroll in. So, really, this is general
information that you want to give to different people. And it works
very much like organizing files on your computer. But one of the
neat things is, it extracts you away from the technology. So I don’t
need to know how to create an html page. I just post up the information
I want in here and it can be displayed to the student on the web.
And that’s really exciting for people who don’t want to know what
technology is and don’t want to deal with the complexity of it.
And that’s very useful.
PAT:
They can just put their Word documents in
this file and then have them displayed?
JENNIFER:
Right. And it gives access to the students. And you
can choose whether or not to publish it. Or publish it at certain
times. And use it as an organization tool to give information to
your students, which may not be available, in an organized fashion,
either online or in paper form. So it enables you to share the same
information with your on-campus students as your off-campus students.
Slide:
K-State Online Course Tools
The other tools that you
have at your disposal is a “Communication Suite,” which I spoke
about earlier; the chat room for synchronous communication; the
message board for asynchronous; the calendar. And, I noticed Karen,
you had a question about, “Is your calendar tied to all campus calendars
or is it stand alone?” You actually have the ability to have a personal
calendar which, if I wanted to organize all of my personal tasks
and events, I can do that. As well as go in and see the course calendar
or the advising space calendar. And we’ve looked at, possibly, putting
the campus calendar in as well. And you can choose to pull all of
those calendars together into one view. So if I had multiple advising
spaces or multiple courses and I wanted to also tie in my personal
calendar, I can see them all at once. So that is actually a really
great feature from, both the advisee standpoint and the advisor,
if they have multiple courses or advising spaces that they’re involved
in.
Slide:
K-State Online Utilities Suite
I’m going to actually
move along to the “Utility Suite.” And this is where you’re giving
access. And I talked about before, can anyone have access to K-State
Online? Anyone can have a student account, but in the roster this
is where you’re giving the students or the advisees access to the
course. So you can see that I have, in my course roster —
I just clicked on it — and I can see that my name’s in there.
The Director of Information Systems, Robert Caffey is in there as
well and then one of the students that actually works for me, Travis
Meili, who was kind enough to let me post up his transcript up here
for us to view today.
Slide:
K-State Online Student ID Picture
And this is where I would
actually go in and one of the unique things about this that we thought
was really important, that we added in, was the ability to kind
of get a closer feel for your students. So one of the things that
we looked at doing was incorporating a way to bring the students’
pictures in. And this is actually pulled from our ID database, where
I can relate a face with an e-mail or a voice or a person and that
way if I see them on campus — if they’re an on-campus student
— I can say hi to them. Or if they’re a distance student I
can kind of get a feel and start building a relationship with them
or make me feel closer to them, as an advisor. And I can also pull
up their information and e-mail them, right from here. And I can
choose to e-mail all of my students or individual students. So it
enables you to do targeted communications as well as broad communications
to all of your advisees.
PAT:
I remember, Jennifer, in the early
days when you guys were working on what you wanted the system to
look like, that some of the advisors talked about wanting to be
able to walk into the waiting room and recognize their students.
And that’s why it was important to try to incorporate the photos
into the system in some way, if possible. So, congratulations on
making that happen.
JENNIFER:
Well, I think it gives a much more humanistic and warm
and fuzzy feel, which I think is important when you’re trying to
build a mentorship or really help people move through some very
important decisions in their lives.
PAT:
That’s true.
Slide:
K-State Online Advisor Report- DOS-based
JENNIFER:
Now I’m actually going to move to, kind of, my favorite
thing which is the “Advisor Report.” And you can see on the listing
“Advisor Report.” I’m obviously not those and neither is Rob. So
we’re going to go ahead and look at Travis. And Travis has a report
so when I click on the DARS report, this is what we get from DARS.
It’s a DOS-based, a really long sheet with all of the different
requirements, he’s in the College of Engineering, and it goes on.
And what we wanted to do is make this easier for the advisors. One
of the things that the advisors did was give us sheets and they
all talked about they each had a sheet that they wrote down everything
in DARS and put it in their filing cabinet so we took all of the
comments from the advisors and said, “Okay, let’s try to mimic what
they’re doing now. Let’s look at what they want to do now.”
Slide:
K-State Online Advisor Report - new GUI
And, what we came up with
was something very similar to what they’re used to viewing. So I
talked about pulling in all of the different data from different
warehouses and we have the picture of Travis and his name and what
his GPA is. And then, actually, if you continue to move down the
page, you can see what electives he’s done. What areas has he completed.
What areas has he not completed. And it’s formatted in a way that
I can easily print it off on my printer in a portrait format. It’s
easy to read. One of the things that differed is, how they wanted
actually to be able to print it out and how they wanted to look
at it.
Slide:
K-State Online Advising Report Layout
And one of the things was,
some people wanted it small font and others wanted it big font.
And whether it fit on one page or multiple pages, that’s one of
the things to look at. So what we wanted to do for them was enable
them to choose. Can I choose portrait? Can I choose landscape? And
the printing — what font size can it be? Do I want to have
to have the student information on top or do I want to show the
transfer courses?
Slide:
K-State Online Advising Report – Customized Layout
So they can actually do a
little bit of customization of the report and the types of information
that they want. And then, so, when you go ahead, you can see these
different changes to the layout, you can then see that it is a completely
different format or report. Which in, this one of doing small text
and doing a landscape, I can fit all of the information about Travis
on one page. So it makes it a little easier if I want to get all
the information I need on one sheet of paper rather than two or
three or four.
So, in working with the advisors,
we’re actually in a stage right now where we’re going back with
them and we’re looking at does the system meet the objectives that
were set with Mel and the committee and how does that meet with
their expectations? And then going back and looking at where we
sit as far as do we need to go a step further? Or does this meet
all of the expectations of the group?
Slide:
Questions?
PAT:
Very nice.
JENNIFER:
So I guess at this point, does anyone have any questions?
Right now, K-State Online and particularly the advising environment
is uniquely built for K-State Online. But we have looked at the
possibility of the future of working with some of the other departments’
management to make it available in those as well.
PAT:
Very nice job, Jennifer.
JENNIFER:
Thank you.
PAT:
I think we should mention you might want
to tell the audience about Rob, who we’ve mentioned him several
times but not explained why he’s not here.
JENNIFER:
Of course. Rob Caffey is the Director of Information
Systems for Division of Continuing Education in K-State and he’s
been an integral part in working with Mel. I don’t know, Mel, if
you want to jump in here and talk a little bit more about Rob’s
role?
MEL:
Well, Rob would probably not say it himself
but I think those of us who work with him would be quick to give
him credit for being the person who really created a whole lot of
what K-State Online is. He had the original idea and, of course,
there are a huge number of people that are working with him now,
but, when he first started there were very few people that were
just trying to put that together. We had a question about K-State
Online and why we’re doing that as a proprietary system as opposed
to what’s available commercially. And, he began developing that
about the same time that many of the commercially available products
were being developed. And we either found those to be too expensive
for us to afford or not responsive enough to the unique kinds of
things that our faculty and students said they needed to have happen.
So they started putting that sort of thing together and we’re now
up to version 4.0 and Rob and his wife have just become parents
the day before yesterday. So he’s got a slightly higher priority
for today than dealing with us. Even though I would say K-State
Online’s probably his second most important love behind his family.
So, that’s where Rob is.
SUE:
And I have a question about K-State
Online. Is it accessible to anybody to go check it out or do you
need guest access? Because it’s your own internal system so can
people just go and check it out?
JENNIFER:
Well we have, as far as the learning management system,
we have a kind of a sister system called Mecnet. And I’ll actually
type in the URL. Then, what we’re doing is, we’re working with a
couple of other community colleges and other organizations that
want to, kind of, test out our learning management system and look
at it. And we have that available as far as a guest system if people
want to go in and take a look at it.
PAT:
Jennifer, you mentioned earlier that you
are working on a demo that will show more of the functionality here
of the academic advising modules. And that we would make that available
on the WCET web site. Do you have any idea how long it’ll be before
that’ll be available?
JENNIFER:
I’m hoping to have it up by the end of this week or
early next.
PAT:
That’ll be great. And Sue I think
you mentioned that you could send a message out to our attendees
to let them know when it’s available?
SUE:
Yes. We do have the e-mail addresses when
people registered for this webcast. So we will let everybody know
who did register, when that’s available.
Slide:
This series is brought to you as part of the WCET’s work on its
Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership Project
PAT:
Great. Well, on behalf of WCET and all of
our attendees today, Mel and Jennifer, I want to thank you very
much for this presentation. I think it’s very exciting what you’ve
created here at Kansas State University. I know that you’re still
in this pilot stage and you’re working with academic advisors still
to refine it. But, I’m sure that both the students and the advisors
are going to appreciate very much your effort on their part.
MEL:
Well, thank you for the chance to present,
Pat. We’ve still got a long way to go, but we like to think we’ve
made a little bit of progress.
Slide:
Providing Student Services to Distance Learners Webcast Series
PAT:
Great. Well, our next webcast, that we mentioned
a little bit earlier, is going to be on Wednesday, November 13 th
at 2pm Eastern Time with Peggi Munkittrick of SCT. And we’ll discuss
SCT’s role in this LAAP Project, as a corporate partner. And also
what SCT has developed during this three-year period to add functionality
to their proprietary products but also about some new products that
they’re bringing to the market that can be used with other types
of systems.
SUE:
I am putting in the chat box, once again,
the URL for this LAAP Project’s web site. Please go there for more
information and links to our webcast series. You may access all
of our webcast series free of charge. And we will soon have the
link to register for Peggi’s webcast. And this webcast has been
recorded and will probably be available as an archive in a couple
o f days.
Slide:
WCET Evaluation
PAT:
And we’d really appreciate it if you’d just
take a minute or two to respond to some questions on an evaluation
that you’ll see on your screen. And that will help us shape other
web casts in the future. In addition, if you have a question or
two you’d like to pose to Mel or Jennifer, you can do that. And
that chat box will be here for about another five minutes so we
can see when some of those responses come in.
SUE:
Mel, there was a question earlier in the
chat box about the software that generates the report. I think the
question is about DARS. Because you have the DARS information. But
how do you generate this new report that you use online.
MEL:
Jennifer, if you’re still on, I’ll
pass that to you. I think the question was does this software generate
to report or is it linked to one that generates the report?
JENNIFER:
We’ve created — to stay on not the technical side
— we’ve created a middleware integration where it’s a software
piece that stands alone that takes the information from the multiple
data sources and pulls them together in a database and re-displays
them into K-State Online. So it’s integrated but it’s not packaged
within K-State Online. Does that answer the question, I guess, adequately?
PAT:
So, Jennifer it’s an interface, in a way,
that pulls all the information from these different systems and
sort of aggregates it and rearranges it. Is that what it does?
JENNIFER:
That’s correct.
PAT:
I think that’s a very important solution.
I think, often times, people think they have to create a whole new
system when, in fact, they may have systems in place it’s just that
the user interface is maybe not as friendly as it needs to be.
JENNIFER:
Well, I think, too, that every organization or university
is very different. So you’re working with very different data types
and very different systems. And it’s difficult to have one solution
that meets everything for everybody.
PAT:
Right. Even within a college I think within
a university we’ve found that to be true.
JENNIFER:
Right.
PAT:
Okay. Well, I think we’re at the end of
our time here. We have a question about the archives. Sue do you
want to respond to that and then we’ll wrap this up?
SUE:
Yes. I hope you’ll go to the WCET
web site for this LAAP Project and you’ll see we have a whole table
of archived web casts. That means all you do is click on it and
it launches. So you can watch all of the webcasts that we’ve done
at your own convenience. So you can watch these files whenever it’s
convenient for you and as many times as you like.
PAT: Okay.
Well, thanks Sue and Mel and Jennifer, once again. And thanks to
all of our attendees for being with us today and we look forward
to seeing you online again in November.
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