By Seth Zlotocha, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Like many institutions, UW-Milwaukee struggles with finding ways to communicate information to students. We send emails, but we also know they're easy to ignore or delete. We put information on the web, but how often are students visiting the campus home page, let alone a department or office page?
For the upcoming Fall 2010 semester, we're trying a new spot for some of this information for students -- the Academic Advisement Report (AAR).
We all think of the AAR is a means for communicating information about degree requirements to students. But why not information on a particular major from an academic department or timely notices from the campus Career Development Center? For starters, many students have a good reason to read their AAR, and they do so with academics in mind. Second, the AAR provides flexibility to tailor specific messages to groups of students based on a variety of pre-conditions, including academic level, student groups, academic standing, and cumulative GPA. Third, the easy integration of HTML code into requirement descriptions in the v9.0 AAR allows messages to students to be short with links to more detailed information presented in a more engaging fashion.
And, with the announcement in the recent FY 2011 Statement of Direction by Oracle that options for text-only requirements are coming to the AAR, integrating messages like these into the AAR could become even more seamless. (For more on the Statement of Direction, see this recent AA forum post).
The first message UW-Milwaukee is releasing is a quick 2-3 sentence note from the Career Development Center on campus. There are different messages for Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors, and each is written to get the students thinking about career-related topics related to their academic level. Provided within each message are links to websites, some point to pages on the Career Development Center site and others point to external websites with useful career development resources. The plan is to update the messages 1-2 times during the academic year, with updates timed just prior to the enrollment periods when the AARs are in high use, and with each update refashioning the messages to get students thinking about career topics related to the time of year, such as summer internships during the spring term.
Of course, using the AAR as a student communication tool is not without its potential pitfalls. One issue the concern that adding a whole bunch of messages to the AAR will make an already lengthy report unnecessarily longer. Another issue is that the HTML code that adds the slick links into the requirement descriptions doesn't render itself properly in the pdf version of the report, instead printing the actual messy code.
At UW-Milwaukee, we don't worry so much about the latter since we don't provide students access to the pdf version of the report, and we're confident the benefits of the links outweigh any messiness that would appear if students get their hands on a pdf version of the report. Plus, embracing the use of HTML links pushes our goal of having the AAR viewed as a real-time, web-based advising (and, now, communication!) tool rather than a static, printed report.
As for the former, that the messages make the report unnecessarily longer, we have agreed to take our time with rolling out the messages from non-academic offices, instituting a process for prioritization and possibly rotation if we start to get a wide number of requests to have messages placed on the AAR. But, the hope is that seeing messages from non-academic offices like the Career Development Center will encourage academic offices to integrate messages, including links, into their existing degree requirements. For instance, a link to a web video that features advisors explaining a difficult requirement, or a link to a podcast from the Linguistics Department in a communication requirement that explains what the heck linguistics is to an 18 or 19-year-old student (or a staff member with an advanced degree working in the Registrar's Office).
In the end, the bottom line motto for rolling out these messages on the AAR at UW-Milwaukee is that anything that makes the AAR a more useful and, thereby, more used advising tool for students, we're going to give it a shot.