 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||
GuidelinesFinal Case Study, by Karen PaulsonKansas State UniversityIntroduction In May 2000, the LAAP Grant evaluator visited Kansas State University (K State or KSU) in Manhattan, Kansas for a three-day site visit. The purpose of the visit was to investigate the existing institutional culture regarding student services, specifically with the intent of understanding the baseline culture in which they would be putting a student service online. Twenty-three (23) individuals - faculty, administrators, and staff - responded to questions put to them by the interviewer. Data from these interviews, collected documents, and website information formed the basis for the first case study report that covered the general campus climate, the structure of information technology, the Division of Continuing Education, and provision of student services at Kansas State University. A second three-day site visit occurred in October 2002, two and a half years after the first visit. The purpose was to see what changes had happened with regard to grant deliverables as well as with the culture of the institution as it worked to bring a non-administrative student service online. Seventeen (17) administrators, faculty, and staff responded to questions in-person or via telephone. Approximately half of the respondents had been interviewed during the first site visit. This final case study report is based on data from interview transcripts, websites, and collected artifacts and focuses more than the first case study on how Kansas State accomplished grant objectives. During a session at the WCET Annual Conference, attendees gave input on what structure would support their use of the case studies. This report follows those suggestions and includes sections on how Kansas State got started on its project, how the institution moved forward on the project, how the project was accomplished at Kansas State, the scale of LAAP grant operations, what unique stumbling blocks Kansas State faced and how it overcame them, what lessons were learned, and finally, what sort of cultural change happened at the institution during the course of the LAAP grant. How Kansas State Got Started on the Project The Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications personnel asked each partner institution to name a principal investigator. At Kansas State, this individual was Mel Chastain, Director of the Kansas Regents Educational Communications Center, and also currently Interim Associate Vice Provost for Information Technology. Dr. Chastain had previous experience working on technology grants awarded through the federal Department of Education, but in his job had neither solely a student services focus nor a distance learning focus. However, he did have an appreciation for these two areas and an ability to identify shared issues across multiple constituencies. As principal investigator Dr. Chastain was clear about his role in grant activities: "my job is to understand and respect the different academic affairs cultures and the ways that they work; academic advising agrees on eighty percent of what is common, only twenty percent is unique." The choice of principal investigator is not to be taken lightly. His abilities for coalition building across units and sectors within the university were noted many times by participants: "he has gotten beneficial people involved." Kudos were given for his "fabulous job of coordinating" the grant at Kansas State. Attention was also paid to Dr. Chastain's ability to be patient with people and circumstances and to not unduly push at inappropriate times. These characteristics combined with his ability to keep a varied group of people on task were key to success at Kansas State. Dr. Chastain gathered a Vision Team for the grant at Kansas State. This group was comprised of individuals from across campus with expertise in both student services and distance learning. The Vision Team included faculty and administrators from student services, the registrar's office, distance learning and computing units, and distance delivered academic programs. In addition to a principal investigator and a Vision Team, Kansas State also had a champion within the upper-level administration: Dr. Elizabeth Unger, Vice Provost for Academic Services and Technology. Her support was critical to maintaining forward momentum when local issues and politics blurred the project focus. Having identified and named people to work on initial grant activities, the Kansas State Vision Team needed to determine which student service - "beyond the administrative core" - it wanted to tackle for the purposes of the grant. The Vision Team came to the grant seriously considering academic advising as its service of choice, particularly since academic advising is a perennial issue at most research universities. A couple of events helped to sharpen this idea. Within the first few months of the grant award, two site visits occurred. The first was from the Western Cooperative grant personnel and its consultants, who investigated what types of student services were provided to distance learning students. Among other items learned as a consequence of this site visit was the information that seventeen separate yet key databases contained necessary student information. The other event was the first evaluation site visit that provided a baseline for the cultural change that was expected to happen and be documented. These site visits concentrated attention and provoked conversations that helped the Vision Team to finalize their decision to focus on academic advising for the grant. Having made the "first-cut" decision to focus on academic advising, then, the focus narrowed further. The Vision Team in conversation with academic advisors from across campus decided to develop an online summary of the DARS (Data Audit Reporting System) data audit output pages so that academic advisors and students could have a quick and easy summary available online for reference during an advising encounter. The final product including functionality that the academic advisors wanted required data elements to be pulled from each of seventeen different databases.
How Kansas State Moved Forward on the Project Early on in the LAAP grant, grant participants decided that there would be no difference between students - online or on-campus. They realized that all students are more savvy with online programs that many faculty or administrators. The Vision Team knew that while Kansas State can "pay attention to the distance learners, it also must enhance the traditional student experience." One Vice President commented, "The great thing about distance learners at K-State is that they make traditional students' lives far easier in all new ways." Indeed, one of the identified Lessons Learned at Kansas State is that "There is no real difference between academic advising for the resident student or the distant learner; that's because, increasingly, there is no real difference between the resident student and the distant learner." The main office of the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) is housed at Kansas State, making them a readily available resource about academic advising in general. NACADA research indicated that 75% of academic advising sessions last from zero to thirty minutes. In those situations, Kansas State's extant DARS report would be too "all encompassing, too unworkable in the average advising session" as it can provide up to twenty pages of detailed information. Therefore, academic advisors requested documentation and data that would be more manageable and useable in an advising session - tailored for use by both distant and local advisees - and include additional data beyond what was in the DARS report. How the Project Was Accomplished at Kansas State Vision Team members and academic advisors met many times, reviewed multiple documents, and responded to a myriad of emails to arrive at the decisions:
Once the decision was made to focus on academic advising, the principal investigator convened academic advisors from across the campus. A Kansas State Lesson Learned is "Select a small group of diverse but respected advisors." One major finding is the variety of academic advising at Kansas State. Academic advisors work with online students, professional academic advisors work in college-level advising centers, faculty advisors meet one-on-one with students in their offices, and other academic advisors shepherd students through professional education programs - just to name a few. Kansas State administrators became much more aware of the wide diversity of academic advising available at the university. Differences also arose because academic advisors approach advising thinking about their students as people, but administrators tend to approach academic advising as if it is all about the data not the students behind the data. These aspects underlie two of the identified Lessons Learned at K-State:
To focus conversations, WCET grant personnel recommended use of scenarios. Scenarios are a method for putting largely undocumented processes into words and flowcharts that allow for a common base of understanding among participants and for a common language between subject matter specialists - in this case, academic advisors - and computer programmers, those that would need to write code for the new online service. Scenarios led to another Kansas State Lesson Learned: "Use pictures to describe processes." At K-State, a facilitated scenario process seemed to work best for many individuals. Two interviewees noted that it took them a long time to understand the intent of the scenarios. Some people thought that the process was helpful but laborious. One interviewee said, "If we hadn't used the scenario process, it could go more quickly, but be less satisfying in the end." Another person noted, "A very nice exercise that provided the foundation for what we do now." One interviewee noted how important it was that computer and academic advisors speak the same language. In the end, Dr. Chastain ended up writing the "first drafts" of the academic advising scenarios, to which others could then react (another Kansas State Lesson Learned: "Do the work, then let them correct it."). To a person, interviewees noted that the "scenarios were a remarkable job" done by K-State's principal investigator. The scenarios deconstructed the academic advising process into manageable pieces and in pragmatic terms. Interviewees also noted that when Dr. Unger attended the meeting and could bridge the cultures of the two groups - she is both a computer expert and an academic administrator - that helped many of them to make sense of the scenarios. Advisors reached consensus quickly on what they would like to see happen with the project. Some people on campus had residual feelings that DARS had been chosen without adequate consultation with faculty or academic advisors. Therefore, many advisors wanted summary advising documents like those that had been previously provided. A workable compromise was reached to create an online academic advising module that summarizes the Data Audit Report System (DARS) multi-page listing of possibilities for each student, which was a difficult and unwieldy format to use during an advising interaction. The module has been built to work in the K-State Online environment. The module summarizes the information from DARS in a more succinct manner, which will result in more efficiencies as academic advisors and students will not need to scan multiple pages of text to determine whether program requirements have been met. Furthermore, the DARS information has been supplemented and enhanced using data elements from seventeen different databases on campus. Now summary categories will give "at-a-glance" information regarding whether an undergraduate student has met certain categories of requirements (such as general education electives). If details are required, a link is available on the page to "drill down" deeper into the full information provided on the DARS report. The new system - because it is built in the K-State Online environment - allows for advisor-student interaction, an improvement over the existing system, which is based on administrative system-student interaction. The work done is a "good start," and academic advisors seem eager to use the new module: "The level of enthusiasm for the new academic advising tool has been quite high." An interviewee mentioned that the existing DARS system was an older, self-service model environment; another interviewee noted, "DARS doesn't think." The new academic advising module is built in and supports collaboration between advisor and student around a tailored response to a student. This change is fundamental and is one of the guiding principles of the LAAP grant as originally envisioned. People are more receptive to the new academic advising module because a) it ameliorates some of the problems of the DARS report by supplementing and summarizing lists of information, and b) K-State Online personnel are receptive and responsive to ongoing suggestions for improvements and refinements to the module. The academic advising module built was a compromise to use DARS data that was already available, supplement that data with additional data from other databases, and summarize it in ways that advisors could use. The new academic advising module is expected to assist the academic advising process in several ways.
The academic advising module should be fully in use by May 2003. Between now and then the academic advisors will be trained. Training students is of less concern because they are very adaptive and move ahead learning things on their own. As with the evolution of any new technology, it is important to change the behaviors of the people who use them. Training is essential for the new academic advising tool to "take hold." The new student service must continue to be both convenient and easy to use if it is to succeed in the long run. When developing the new service, K-State Online programmers did not use the scenarios that had been drafted and sharpened focus. Instead, they found that having academic advisors rate six or seven features based on a University of Texas demonstration of its online system helped the most. The programmers felt that single hour spent getting feedback on those features was better spent than the time spent on the scenario process. They found that users have an easier time responding to what they have seen before, ranking features from most useful to least useful, or most important to least important. Programmers discovered that many of the features that academic advisors wanted were already included in K-State Online functions; what was missing was specific information from the DARS report and other on-campus databases. When the academic advisors got together it became obvious that they were "products of their academic culture" - they defend academic advising and the culture in which it is done, which differs for each department or college. When setting up a university-wide system, remember to honor people's need to be different and then to respect those differences but focus on the similarities. In the final analysis of needed DARS data, across the many different types of academic advising, approximately 80% was shared and 20% was unique to the situation, which led to another Kansas State Lesson Learned: "Respect the differences, but concentrate on the similarities." Everyone agreed that an iterative process was the most useful because it built ownership amongst users - subject matter experts, the academic advisors - and programmers. Personnel within the K-State Online unit suggested different ways to develop the academic advising tool. The other on-campus unit that had the technical expertise to develop the tool was the Office of Information Systems (OIS), but it was decided that K-State Online would take the lead with input and collaboration from OIS. While the new tool was being built into the K-State Online shell, OIS was adding usability and significant value to the existing DARS report. The final tool was a combination of the existing DARS report, which pulled student information from multiple databases based on institutional program definitions, the K-State Online shell, and student photos integrated from yet another system. All of this integration led to another identified Kansas State Lesson Learned: Attack the "data base fiefdoms." The amount of integration also means that authority for the new module is shared. The registrar's office maintains authority for the student data used, and K-State Online maintains the shell or system used to analyze the data. Integrating the academic advising tool into K-State Online and combining multiple years of a student work decreases time spent by academic advisors on collecting and reviewing information prior to an advising encounter. In addition, advisors can now use other students as mentors to their advisees via chat rooms or discussion boards, and academic advisors are able to avoid having students sit around waiting for copies of their advising reports. Academic advisors are very happy with the incorporation of students' photos into the new tool; advisors who have hundreds of advisees, or who have advisees who see them infrequently, appreciate being able to "put a face with a name." There is momentum at Kansas State to give attention to additional online student services. What made this project work in the end was 1) people were satisfied, and 2) a lot of faculty and academic advisors provided input. Conceptually it was a boost for Kansas State because it was an area that they were not thinking about previously. The project was good because non-administrative online student services like academic advising gave people a place to get started and it's a viable point of leverage within the Kansas State culture in terms of both online learning and traditional academics.
Kansas State LAAP Grant Scale of Operations The amount of time, effort, and money that Kansas State put into the development of this student service is a mixture of sweat equity on the part of salaried individuals, well-timed energy boosts and focusing from consultants paid by the grant, limited grant funding for tool development and programming, and institutional matching funds to complete development. Many of these costs are hidden and undocumented. Clearly, there were hours spent by Vision Team members and academic advisors, as well as the principal investigator in meetings and reviewing drafts of scenarios. Future costs include the time to maintain the tool as well as providing training to new users. Faculty, academic advisors, and students will need to learn how to use the new tool; this training will involve learning how to use K-State Online as well as the new academic advising module. Regular updates and "on demand" sessions are available at the Information Technology Assistance Center (iTAC). One faculty member was concerned about the amount of time to learn how to use both K-State Online and the new advising tool. However, other respondents noted the ease with which they learned the new system and that comprehensive help was easily available from K-State Online. The full potential has been yet to be realized because the module was just unveiled in late 2002, and academic advisors are now training in how to access and use it. Once the decision had been made to build the advising tool and the cooperation of all necessary units was secured, it took technical programmers only about two to three months to build the actual tool. The real costs of developing the academic advising tool could be estimated at simply the writing of the report (the code) and the template. While the grant did not fully cover the costs of building the academic advising module, the grant was the occasion for and motivated the building of the module. While there was a lot accomplished for the amount spent, there was considerable ongoing stress about the low level of funding available from the grant. K-State made an institutional investment in the product, which will hopefully mean that there is more institutional ownership and use of the final tool. Unique Stumbling Blocks and How They Were Overcome Each institution has its own particular culture, and all three of the institutions in this project are no different. This uniqueness has led one individual to wonder how useable the findings are from a single institution because so much is predicated on uniqueness and how that uniqueness was exploited or adapted to complete the project. Nevertheless, institutions can learn from the successes and travails of other institutions. At Kansas State the actual technical building of the module
for a common data audit summary document was relatively easy
compared to the jurisdictional and political differences that
had to be overcome. A turning point seemed to be when Dr.
Unger attended a meeting of administrators and asked, "Why
can't we do this?" No one had a response. The outcome: "So,
let's do it." Individuals at Kansas State were surprised by
what was accomplished once the necessary entities and people
were in the same room. It seemed like it was an insurmountable
task, but in the end, everyone did a remarkable job to make
it happen. It was noted that in some ways the problems at K-State have not been fixed; they were only overcome for grant purposes. Whether this cooperation represents a dramatic change of culture remains to be seen, post-grant. The nature of DARS is that as academic program requirements change, so should the DARS guidelines and sorting functions be updated to reflect those changes. There are frequent problems with inaccuracies in the existing DARS printouts because it is difficult to keep up with all the changes on campus. In addition, information is drawn from multiple databases. These problems are then propagated into the new tool. There are concerns regarding how well changes at the basic data levels and in the basic databases will cascade and be reflected downstream in the new academic advising tool. Advisors do not want to work with outdated or incorrect information. Some people worry that moving to an online advising process will diminish the experience by decreasing the amount of face-to-face interaction. Others note that in the long run the quality of face-to-face interaction may increase. Eliminating data sorting and minutia during the advising interaction may mean the students receive more in-depth attention.
Lessons Learned and Cultural Changes Kansas State's identified Lessons Learned have been embedded in the text of this report. Here are additional lessons learned that were noted during the site visit and in communication with the evaluator:
Kansas State University has come a long way since receipt of the LAAP grant in January 2000. Kansas State faculty and administrators are beginning to consider distance students in academic processes, which is a good next step. Others are thinking about how to make the module more interactive in the future, allowing academic advisors to make adaptations that are then fed back through into the student information system. Having made progress to fulfill LAAP grant requirements, Kansas State University has discovered positive things about itself, reaffirming its commitment to students and what is best for them academically. Assessment Suite, Fall 2002, iTAC Training Sponsored by DCE and iTAC. Content Management Suite, Fall 2002, iTAC Training Sponsored by DCE and iTAC. K-State Online Planning timeline for LAAP project, no date. Website: www.wcet.info/projects/laap/partners/ksu.asp
|
