LAAP Project Demonstration: Online Academic Advising with Mel Chastain

October 16, 2002 / Archived webcast / Transcript

Like many institutions of higher education, K-State has developed its assortment of student services one at a time over decades, each in response to a need, opportunity or to achieve greater efficiency. With the advent of technology-enhanced classrooms, laboratories and recitation facilities on campus came the development of individual learning experiences and entire programs of study available for the distant learner. Once in place, there no longer existed any significant difference between its “resident” and “distant” learners. Both had needs for services that could be more efficiently served online (assuming the many and diverse services and data bases could somehow be interrogated and displayed in a user-friendly online mode).

Online academic advising is a microcosm of this situation. Both the learner (and advisor) demand online access to data stored in many locations but require that it be presented in a comprehensive summary format. Further, they need ways to simultaneously share both the data and the communications channels with each other, either in real time or asynchronously, in order to make informed decisions about future academic choices.

K-State has combined an online academic advising system with its in-house online course management system to enable advisors and learners to interact with one another regardless of the time or space between them. In that sense, the system sees no difference between the resident and/or distant learner. The system is new and just now being learned by a set of academic advisors from several colleges within the university.

This webcast will discuss the administrative, logistical, political, security and technical issues that were confronted, resolved, circumvented and/or ignored in order to reach a solution to its online academic advising need. A demonstration of the system will be included in the presentation.

Mel Chastain is the Director of the Kansas Regents Educational Communications Center at Kansas State University, where he is also the Interim Associate Vice Provost for Information Technology. As the K-State coordinator for this LAAP project, he was a part of team of administrators, technical support staff, academic advisors and distant learners with which he was able to discuss and work toward the solution of the many issues related to this initiative. His background (devoid of any academic advising or computer programming experience), includes 20-plus years of classroom teaching at the higher education level, along with a similar tenure in the development and operation of public radio and television facilities. This appreciation for the academic, technical and management components of the project helped lead to the solutions presented in the webcast.