Online Advising Project Need(s) Statement

What need(s) does this project address or fill? What is the problem the project is designed to address? What about the current situation is unacceptable? Why do we need to move forward with this project? 

Introduction

Last year, 462,778 students were enrolled in the community and technical college system. Most were intent on completing a certificate, degree, or transfer to a baccalaureate institution. Many of these students will take more time and spend more money to achieve their educational goals because they repeated courses, didn’t take the appropriate prerequisites, or didn’t understand the degree requirements. In many cases, students did not seek advice, early in their studies, to help them with their planning. For example, a high-school student decides she wants to become an auto mechanic. Unaware that today’s auto mechanics utilize mathematics and computers in their work, the student fails to take these courses in high-school. When she enters community college, she finds herself taking remedial courses that could have been taken in high school, instead of being able to immediately begin her core academic courses. Had “recommended prerequisite information” been easily assessable to the student, she would have been able to complete her auto-mechanic certification more efficiently.

Advising is critically important for students because it enables them to navigate a sometimes confusing array of information to ensure that they take only the classes they need and avoid the classes they don’t. In order to reduce the number of extra classes and additional expense, students must be encouraged to seek expert advising to assure that they are prepared to complete their students in the most efficient means possible.

Identified Needs

1. The Online Educational Planning and Advising Project intends to address the needs students have for accessible, effective, and efficient educational planning and advising resources as they enter and transition through a community and technical college. Effective and efficient navigation through our institutions and degree programs requires student access to accurate information, decision making tools and resources, and assistance from qualified professional faculty and staff. Academic planning and advising resources must address students’ need for the right information at the right time to help them plan their way through our educational system.

2. Currently, depending on a student’s path through the educational system, she or he receives a wide range of academic planning information from a diverse set of sources, processes, systems that likely include K12, Community and Technical Colleges and the University system. Each of these environments has different needs, goals and processes and students needs change as they navigate through each of them. As such, it is essential to address the ongoing need for an integrated planning system that supports the student’s ongoing academic goals regardless of his or her current academic plan or place in the system.

3. The Online Educational Planning and Advising Project addresses a key dimension of a comprehensive suite of advising and academic planning tools. Concurrently, the Higher Education Coordinating Board is developing other critical and complimentary aspects of this comprehensive system. In order to assure seamless integration of these projects (as well as other related initiatives and interests), all project development efforts will be shared and collaboratively aligned.

4. Currently, information that students and advisors need to make informed academic decisions is complex, not held in one place, and constantly changing; within the current environment the potential for human error is high.

5. Complexity and scarcity of resources requires efficient solutions to the ways academic planning and advising information is collected, stored, communicated, accessed, and updated by students and advisors.

6. Students are increasingly living life on the web and have high expectations for access to web-based tools and solutions.

7. Students interact with community and technical colleges in many diverse ways and increasingly expect access to services irrespective of their location or time of day.

8. The Online Educational Planning and Advising Project will address the need to reduce inefficiencies and costs associated with the progression of students through the State’s education system. As such, the system must be designed to meet the needs of a wide array of users including high school students, students returning to school after an extended absence, enrolled and prospective students, parents, faculty, and staff. Providing access to accurate and interactive academic information and planning tools will allow students to make better choices concerning course sequencing and selection and increase the likelihood that students will make sound choices about their education.
   
   
9. Community and technical colleges have inadequate information concerning student course taking intent and behavior. Common planning tools for students should provide a useful source of data to support decision making related to planning course offerings, program need and development, faculty staffing levels, and strategic planning, etc.