Advising for a New College Reality: Dual-credit High School Students in an Online University

Blogging the Online Learning Consortium International Conference 2014

Presenters: Daniel McCoy, Sophie Spratley, Jessa Carpenter (University of Florida)

UFL’s Concurrent Enrollment program website Nice example of resources that need to be built around the dual credit program

Interesting Notes

  • Trends: accelerated high school online (virtual schooling), home schooling – dual credit helps home school students transition to 4 year universities, advance placement exams, growth in dual enrollment in the Florida community colleges
  • F2F dual credit is seen as easier than AP, and online is seen as more difficult than AP
  • Issues: Students may not be prepared – the risk to their transcript. Creating a transcript early can be a high risk situation for the student. If they aren’t able to be successful, the result may affect their college future.
  • Advising: They created an advising syllabus so standardize the advising process and share expectations with students. The same best practices for advising apply online as well. Students need help choosing which courses. The advisor follows up with the student three times during the semester (before withdrawal, in the middle, and during exams). They have an intervention strategy, which includes at the extreme, calling parents if they aren’t hearing from the student. Building relationships with districts, faculty, parents, and students. The faculty can contact the advisors if students aren’t showing up. They offer the same services as Student Affairs and so maintain a relationship with them.
  • Case Management and Customer Service: These are critical foundations. They use a helpdesk software and make a ticket for each student, and then all the interactions with the student are recorded in that system. This is a cool idea and something to consider as we look to support our students.
  • Orientation: University policy, setting up their university email account, explaining how professor office hours work, being a good online learner, how to get into a routine online learning.
  • Email issues: They work really hard to get the students to use the university email, including emailing them back on their non-university account and telling them to check the university account for the answer.
  • Self-assessment: Students take a self-assessment to see if they are ready for online learning.

Tools

  • Redmine – tool for the helpdesk ticket already used inside the department.

Things to Apply

Some things that I think we could work on to improve and expand our courses for high school students:

  • Orientation
  • Self-assessment
  • Advising could be reviewed
  • Ways we deal with university email
  • FERPA considerations – they use a customer service method to teach parents about FERPA

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