E-portfolios are an increasingly important part of the college experience and can be a fundamental means for the documentation of advising outcomes....Academic advising should become a vital portion within the increasing number of e-portfolio programs. Recognizing that advising is teaching, NACADA members have promoted the advising syllabus as a means to identify learning outcomes students can attain through the advising process. The e-portfolio contributes to the achievement of numerous learning goals. Therefore, advisors should consider how the activities and expectations that make up advising syllabi can be connected to and facilitated by electronic portfolios. The possibilities are ripe for study and experimentation.
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Incorporating technology into advising practices that are meaningful to students can be challenging. Challenges are even greater when an institution’s student population consists of non-traditional learners juggling a multitude of roles and responsibilities, whose age range spans forty years, and whose technological skills range from a minimal understanding of basic computing to coordinating corporate networks. How can advisors effectively integrate existing technology to communicate with students, build community, provide timely information, and establish a non-threatening environment for learners? Advisors should consider their institutions’ online course management systems.
Academic advisors play many roles as students progress through our institutions. Helping students increase their levels of positive self-reflection can help students increase the expectations they set for themselves and lead students to regularly view themselves as positively engaged and academically talented. Positively engaged students leave advising sessions reflecting on their strengths rather than focusing on their deficiencies....Strengths-based advising can help advisors focus on students’ strengths. When we implement an advising model best suited to students’ strengths, we increase students’ chances of success at our institutions.
A good advisor is essential when “real life” gets in the way. In graduate school, it is very possible for students to fall through the cracks....Graduate school can be tough. The biggest challenge is finishing.... Discipline and working with others can help graduate students see the light at the end of the tunnel. It can be done. Parents, professors, and society encourage education, yet at the highest echelons of education, some students may find that there is not enough support. Advisors can help students strategize and find the inner strength and the discipline needed to complete what they began.
The NACADA Academic Advising Summer Institute brought together over 100 advising professionals with experts in the field to work on impacting student success at campuses across the nation.... This was not your average conference. This was not a drive-in workshop. This was an institute, an academic experience, and a refreshing start to the consideration of academic advising holistically....We all engaged in learning about advising structures and systems, research and development, and of course, politics and personalities as they pertain to setting an agenda for advising on our campuses....Summer Institute was a shared experience with other colleagues who care about the students we support; it was a professional development experience unlike any other.
I cannot say enough positive and exciting things about NACADA and how the organization and its people have influenced my life and my professional development! To my mind, NACADA is nothing short of being a land of opportunity overflowing with milk and honey for those with a desire to become involved. NACADA believes in the abilities of its members and for those with the desire to act upon their own faith by becoming involved will find that NACADA continues to advance the advising profession towards excellence and greatness not only for us as professionals, but more importantly for the students we serve!
From June 2005 through December 2011, this publication was titled Academic Advising Today: Lighting Student Pathways. Articles included in these archived editions will be presented in a compiled version as well as broken down into individual articles to facilitate search capacity. News features from this period may be attained by contacting the Managing Editor.
Baxter Magolda’s (2001) Learning Partnerships Model (LPM) provides a three-principled heuristic for implementing interactive and engaged advising that may help advisors help students who are in need of learning to balance multiple perspectives...Implementation of the LPM with diverse college students, however, requires recognition of cultural differences.
We spend so much of our time encouraging our students to become lifelong learners that sometimes we forget to “walk the talk.” Conferences like the NACADA annual and regional conferences are just some of the opportunities we have to continue to grow and develop as professionals and people.
