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Serving the Online Learner
4/1/2007
Through the deployment of online tutoring services from Smarthinking, Rio Salado offers an instructional help desk that provides students with 24/7 academic support for science and math courses. The institution also provides advising services on placement testing for new students, transcript evaluation processes for transfer students, and degree planning, and is designing a new proactive advising service that will help students stay on track to complete a degree. This type of ongoing support—particularly for the majority of courses during the first two years—can prevent faculty from being barraged by constant questions, and fosters the trend of supporting online learning with a team of people, rather than a lone faculty member.
Plan for Technology Investment
Students considering an online learning program often need to wait until their interests, life commitments, and career aspirations come into alignment. This extended period of data gathering and decision-making means that online programs need to invest in systems and people to support that ongoing relationship, even if the revenue is realized much later in the game. Increasingly, savvy institutions are integrating constituent relationship management (CRM) software, such as that available from Oracle and Saba, to manage student contacts. These types of systems, with their detailed recordkeeping capabilities, are key to supporting more effective recruiting, advising, and program planning for students—particularly as the need to track students across programs and institutions, and across online and campus programs, becomes more acute.
Institutions are increasingly committed to strengthening the link between advising and instruction, so that they can not only better support a student’s progress toward a degree, but also guide that individual toward a degree that is appropriate for his or her life plan. The electronic portfolio is a technology tool with potential to support this link between students, advising, and systems. ePortfolios are useful tools for students, academic staff, and all those interested in “meaningful outcomes” of learning.
Institutions willing to risk investment in these types of customer services can secure for themselves an image and reputation for accessibility and quality that will help build customers for life, as well as build the growth sector of lifelong learning services.
Judith V. Boettcher (judith@designingforlearning.info) is an independent consultant specializing
in distance learning and the applications of new media.
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