Ryan Howlett, Syracuse University Molly Clock, Syracuse University
During the worst of the COVID pandemic, academic advisors were forced to re-create their roles with students in virtual spaces, relying on technology (Zoom, Meet, etc.) to do so. While the immediate concern at the time was to replace in-person advising (IPA) with remote academic advising (RAA), it was hard to imagine the potential of remote space as something that could rival in-person appointments. As students continue to use RAA, development of technological tools remains a growing need in advising practices striving for equity in advising across all platforms.
The benefits of IPA are clear and seem universally approved. Advisors (generally) meet one-on-one with their students in an office space dedicated to advising. Once there, advisors can foster a relationship with students in myriad ways. They can be personal and engaging and ask questions with the benefit of observing facial or body language (or other physical input) to gauge a student’s comfort or competency as it relates to their understanding of their academic standing. To achieve this virtually is more difficult, as students cite increased engagement and consistent accessibility as reasons to favor IPA (Ledonne-Smith & Keith, 2022).
Recent studies have indicated that when students have a choice, many prefer RAA (Peters et al., 2023). The benefits of RAA are clear; students have greater scheduling flexibility for meeting advisors, feel safer, and don’t have to travel anywhere or account for time in the same way they would for in-person appointments on campus. However, the drawbacks also seem clear. Access to technology that allows for seamless, lag-free virtual advising, at a minimum, high-speed internet, may not be available to all students, and may reinforce inequality (Braun, 2024). It’s also harder to make a personal connection through a screen—especially when students are not comfortable turning on their camera. Should advisors use RAA as an informational or transactional tool that largely serves to disseminate quick academic answers to student questions? Or might there be tools to aid advisors in reenvisioning the virtual space to equalize the IPA vs RAA playing field. One such tool might be right under an advisor's nose, or, more precisely, to the right of the shared screen button.
Zoom whiteboards (and other similar platforms) are an underutilized resource that advisors can employ to address some of the drawbacks of RAA for advising offices. The whiteboard offers advisors, especially those who espouse advising-as-teaching theory (Crookston, 1972) the option to design a developmentally sound space that can not only address the relational and learning-centered aspects of an appointment but, in many ways, also enhance the collaborative aspects of a traditional advisor-advisee meeting. Figure 1 Creating the Virtual Space
Figure 2 Creating the Virtual Space
The whiteboard (or other similar collaborative platforms) allows advisors to intentionally organize the virtual space to complement or mirror their physical office space in a way that can be tailored to individual advisors. Creating a new office space may seem daunting, however unlike a physical office there is nothing to be moved, and no hammers need to touch the walls. In fact, in terms of space, the sky’s the limit for how to build, dedicate, and decorate. One practical way that advisors might get started in creating a whiteboard space would be to organize the space according to the NACADA core competencies: the conceptual, the informational, and the relational (NACADA, 2017). An advisor’s virtual space should be informed by various advising approaches, learning outcomes, and equity. Furthermore, they should be anchored by NACADA’s core values: caring, commitment, empowerment, inclusivity, integrity, professionalism, and respect (NACADA, 2017). In Figure 1, the virtual space highlights all three of NACADA’s core competencies. Personal touches add to the relational, common timely deadlines contribute to the informational, and a focus on student agency with notetaking and goal-setting plays to the conceptual. In Figure 2, the virtual space is grounded in advising as teaching and appreciative advising practices (Bloom et al., 2008). The appointment overview foregrounds its approach using a lesson plan that is transparently shared and invites student collaboration.
In addressing NACADA’s informational competency (2017), using a virtual whiteboard space allows advisors to spend less time accounting for transactional questions that students may ask, allowing for quick transfer of resources and procedures into the student’s hands. To that end, the whiteboard also addresses what Lowenstein calls “the signpost function” and allows advisors to teach how degree requirements and requisites fit into a (literal) bigger picture (Lowenstein, 2014).
Many advisors choose to display important information for their students in their physical spaces: calendars with important dates and deadlines; posters advertising academic or professional resources like support services, extra help, career fairs, etc.; and useful explainers for common questions. The Zoom whiteboard allows for similar representation of this information with the bonus of having a multitude of resources in one place with multiple access points. What’s more, the mirror space helps advisors (as teachers) utilize a UDL or Universal Design for Learning model (CAST, 2024) in the multiplicity of delivering content and the open reception of multiple pathways for students to respond.
This laying out of information allows advisors to transition from the transactional into the relational as advisors can model navigating these webpages, encourage students to access the links on their own by clicking directly/scanning the whiteboard (no Zoom chat needed), and further explore unique cases with customizable graphic organizers and visuals, representing a multimodal approach to learning our college’s rules, regulations, and academic policies.
The placement of resources within the space can help facilitate a variety of conversations, much like visuals in the physical space. For advisors who work in integrated academic and career offices, housing career development resources in the mirror space makes them easily accessible to both the student and advisor, leading to a natural transition to conversations about professional, post-graduation goals. Showing students that career development lives in close proximity with academic advising, in both a figurative and literal sense, may help students consider their professional goals well before their graduation, helping to connect with resources on campus to lay the groundwork for their career success early in their collegiate journeys. This could lead to new strategies and tools for remote academic and career advising (RACA).
Advisors could use this proximity strategy to scaffold important goals or initiatives. Career development tools and resources can be placed in view of their students to be touched on briefly during appointments that may already be short on time, with the intention of building in the next appointment, which also aligns with NACADA’s relational competency.
The benefits of using the mirror space as a repository of live QR codes/links help facilitate re-booking with an advisor to build on discussions and fuel on-going dialogue. As Steve Shaffling notes, advising meetings are considered staff and faculty interactions according to Tinto’s theory of student departure (Tinto, 1975) and every additional student advisor meeting potentially aids student retention (Schaffling, 2018). Additionally, (and for various reasons) some students may not feel comfortable visiting with advisors in-person, so creating a welcoming and more collaborative virtual space may help those students bypass an obstacle to advising support. Subsequent meetings help empower student agency. Furthermore, virtual collaboration may allow more room for students to impart and share their own cultural capital (Yosso, 2005). In the future, using the mirror space can help advisors and students mutually collaborate on a space that they both have a say in building, allowing for the best of two (RAA and IPA) worlds.
Drawbacks to Consider
Exploration of a new tool comes with drawbacks and important learning experiences. One concern in the initial exploration of this tool is privacy of student information in a shared space. Whiteboards can be presented in two modes: presenting and collaborating. In the collaborating mode, students can take their own notes and contribute to the whiteboard; however, every edit leaves a trace in the edit history that is tied to the student’s name. Though not immediately visible or obviously accessible to the average user, this edit history could be viewed by another collaborator in the space. Edit history is not available in the presenting view with persistent sharing clicked off, aligning with the NACADA information competency and FERPA guidelines. Creating a separate whiteboard for each student would alleviate this issue but would create dozens if not hundreds of separate whiteboard spaces, owned and managed by the advisor. For now, the tools can be used with the aforementioned settings, though eliminating the most ideal two-way collaboration until more sustainable workarounds can be established.
Additional Benefits
The SAMR model (Puentedura, 2015) outlines four phases in which technology can be applied to work in a K-12 classroom, though the same principles can be logically applied to practices in higher education. RAA began as a substitute, where technology is used as a one-to-one replacement for a learning strategy or tool: in this case, meeting with students during the COVID-19 pandemic. It could be argued that as students voiced a preference for RAA and its benefits, many practitioners moved to the augmentation phase of the model, where RAA is still a substitute for IPA but with additional improvements and personalization as advisors become better-versed in synchronous and asynchronous communication technologies.
Exploring tools such as Zoom whiteboards may lead to the modification or even the redefinition phase of the SAMR model, where advisors can use technology to fine tune their advising practice. The convenience of having linked supports to scan/interact with may prove to be an advantage to all students whether they see their advisor in their physical or virtual space.
References
Bloom, J. L., Hutson, B. L., & He, Y. (2008). The appreciative advising revolution. Stipes Publishing.
Braun, E. (2024). Remote academic advising: A review of the post-pandemic literature. Academic Advising Today. https://nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Academic-Advising-Today/View-Articles/Remote-Academic-Advising-A-Review-of-the-Post-Pandemic-Literature.aspx
CAST (2024). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. https://udlguidelines.cast.org
Crookston, B. B. (1972). A developmental view of academic advising as teaching. Journal of College Student Personnel, 13(1), 12–17.
Ledonne-Smith, L., & Keith, J. (2022, June). Academic advising in a virtual environment: The pros & cons from an advising and student perspective. Academic Advising Today. https://nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Academic-Advising-Today/View-Articles/Academic-Advising-in-a-Virtual-Environment-The-Pros-Cons-From-an-Advising-and-Student-Perspective.aspx
Lowenstein, M. (2014). Toward a theory of advising. The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal, 16. http://doi.org/10.26209/MJ1661268
NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising. (2017). NACADA academic advising core competencies model. https://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Pillars/CoreCompetencies.aspx
NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising. (2017). NACADA core values of academic advising. https://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Pillars/CoreValues.aspx
Peters, B., Burton, D., & Rich, S. (2023). Post COVID-19: A comparative assessment of in- person and virtual academic advising. NACADA Review, 4(1), 2–15. https://doi.org/10.12930/NACR-D-22-10
Puentedura, R. R. (2015, October 14). SAMR: A brief introduction. Hippasus. http://hippasus.com/rrpweblog/archives/2015/10/SAMR_ABriefIntro.pdf
Schaffling, S. (2018, September). Common factors: A meta-model of academic advising. Academic Advising Today, 41(3). https://nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Academic-Advising-Today/View-Articles/Common-Factors-A-Meta-Model-of-Academic-Advising.aspx
Tinto, V. (1975, Winter). Dropout from higher education: A theoretical synthesis of recent research. Review of Educational Research, 45(1), 89–125. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170024
Yosso, T. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006
