Administrative Services, Academic Support, and Community Building
The retention rate for students who learn in their own space and time has been a problem. How should the school adjust certain traditional student services to provide for a feeling of connectedness and belonging for distance education students? Will this aid in retention and better student outcomes?
• Administrative services. These services include registration, financial aid, adds and drops, and admissions. 531Since most schools provide these services online, the procedures for accessing them should be the same as those used by on-campus students. The key institutional issue here is whether this should be a portal solution with one interface or stand-alone systems.
• Academic support. This includes advising and career services. Many of these services are already extended to students through web portals or department websites and through social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The school may need to develop additional options for use of social media tools to extend the services in both time and space. For example, use of video conferencing or chat rooms for advising sessions with extended hours may be appropriate. It may also be important to put in place an alert and “job well done” system (such as Starfish, www.starfishsolutions.com) to keep students on track and motivate them to finish. Questions to ask are: Does the software integrate with the CMS? What are the issues if it does integrate? If it doesn’t integrate? Some schools also have as a part of the student information system an online audit for ease of scheduling courses, reminders for requirements they met, and links to appropriate content.