APPENDIX H:
TECHNOLOGY COORDINATION PROPOSAL
Concept: Organizing advising information resources
By: Mike Pflieger, Assistant Dean – L&S
Submitted To: the MIU Advising Working Group
Thesis: Information1, and systems for generating, accessing, and interpreting information, is
critical to academic advising. Our current structures do not support the development of
information systems that meet the needs of academic advisors. UW-Madison should
reorganize so that advising information resources are accessible, coordinated, and sustainable.
In the past few years, several projects have attempted to meet specific information system
needs for academic advisors. Some examples include:
•
Advisor Notes, which attempts to consolidate the notations made by advisors and other student
service professionals in a commonly used system, so that information can be shared
•
L&S DARS-X, designed to connect advisors more directly with the academic requirements of
their program and allow them to request academic exceptions to that program.
•
Biology Course Guide, the model for the campus Course Guide which seeks to provide enriched
course information to students within the biological sciences.
•
Engineering Degree Planner, developed by Engineering to facilitate four-year degree planning
for students, and to provide data for enrollment planning.
•
DARS Batch/Analysis, used to analyze aggregate student degree progress and facilitate
proactive advising, departmental academic planning, and policy review.
•
Query Library, a repository of user-defined queries of warehoused student, curricular, HR and
payroll data that gives staff direct access to data to meet specific business needs.
Each of these projects began as a grass roots effort to meet a specific, immediate need.
Projects on this list (and others not listed) benefited from the expertise of academic advisors in
the development stage. However, many lacked visibility or campus-wide support and are thus
unsustainable. We should ask why it was necessary for these projects to develop in this way.
The grass roots dynamic and the need for better coordination is a consistent theme at UWMadison. For example, grass roots efforts have been meeting the data management, imaging,
and collaboration needs of the research enterprise for years. Recognizing the inherent
limitations of this approach, the campus Information Technology Committee will be
1
Note that the thrust of this paper is information, which is defined as knowledge communicated or received concerning a
particular fact or circumstance. In this sense, while technology is an important vehicle through which we access, manipulate,
and interpret information, it is not the end in itself. I may in this document use information, systems, resources, and technology
somewhat interchangeably, but in each case the emphasis is on knowledge, facts and circumstances needed for academic
advising.
recommending a culture change at UW-Madison, so that research computing can benefit from
a single point of access, leadership, and a funding model supported centrally on campus.2
A culture change is needed for advising system resources, as well. Continuing to rely on grass
roots efforts is unsustainable – despite its merits, an uncoordinated, invisible, and underfunded
project cannot reach its full potential. A systems solution developed in isolation is more likely
to be built upon an unsupported software platform, may not scale to meet the needs of all
potential users, won’t easily integrate with other systems, and is not be adequately resourced
for future enhancement or ongoing maintenance and support. The solutions for advising
information resources parallel those for research computing: UW-Madison needs a single
point of access, leadership, and a funding model supported centrally on campus to better
coordinate and support core campus advising information resources.
Organizing to support advising information resources
As the MIU brings attention to academic advising and student services, it is important to
recognize that the quality of advising, in part, depends upon the quality of information available
to adviser. Thus, as the MIU supports improved advising, it should support improved advising
information systems. And, for there to be any accountability for improvements, there needs to
be leadership, adequate funding, and sufficient authority for advising system coordination.
There are at least three options to organize around this need (there may be others), and each
has potential benefits and risks that should be carefully assessed:
1. Advising information resources within a new campus Undergraduate Advising unit
Advising information resources delivered through a central advising unit makes sense. The outputs
should benefit from a deep understanding of and focus on meeting the needs of academic advisors.
A risk is that it may too narrowly focused on advising, and therefore will create solutions that do not
integrate well with other campus needs or systems, such as student records.
2. Advising information resources as a unit in the Office of the CIO
Placing responsibility for campus coordination in the Office of the CIO should ensure that the
information needs of advisors it benefits from high priority, visibility, and a broad and long-range
view of campus technology solutions. A risk is that the CIO organizational structure – ostensibly
DoIT – is a large organization that charges for its services and may tend to seek a technological
solution for every challenge, despite the emphasis on information needs.
3. Advising information resources in the Division of Enrollment Management (DEM)
The Division of Enrollment Management is an appropriate consideration as advising system
developments has implications for FERPA and other student records retention/disposition policies.
Advising information resources coordinated by the DEM could be benefit from integration with
student records systems (e.g., ISIS, DARS, and ImageNow). The risks are that the limitations of these
2
Research Computing Initiative for UW-Madison: A Culture Change. Examples of grass roots effort include the Social Science
Computing Cooperative and Research Data Services which provide research data management services, the Laboratory for
Optical and Computational Instrumentation (LOCI) which develops imaging and computational techniques to assist many
research endeavors, and the Electronic Lab Notebooks project which seeks to encourage collaboration through sharing of lab
data. Each of these efforts is funded almost entirely through research grants and lack the support and visibility that campus
level attention can provide.
systems may preclude solutions specific to advisers, or that advisors may not be sufficiently involved
in the development stages of systems that directly impact their work.
Primary Responsibilities
Wherever it is located organizationally, the responsibilities of a new, campus-wide coordinating
office for advising information resources will have to both be aware of grass-roots
developments (which should continue) in order to support them and to articulate a vision for
more systematic development going forward. Notice that this paper does not advocate that a
campus entity for advising information systems should dictate system development. On the
contrary, it should be a locus of access, support, coordination, and visibility for the needs of
academic advising on campus.
Some of the responsibilities I see as needed and appropriate for such a unit includes:
•
Collecting ideas and articulating a vision for advising information systems that can sustain
academic advising at UW-Madison
•
Forming a campus-wide representative body for advising input and collecting and publishing
stakeholder feedback through all phases of projects
•
Ensuring that solutions are compatible with technical infrastructures and can be supported by
UW-Madison technological resources, such as DoIT
•
Integrating systems to create enriched data repositories for analysis and assessment
•
Providing financial and/or human resources to projects, where possible
•
Identifying the training needs and resources that supports widespread use of an advising
information system solution
•
Communicating with software vendors in order to predict future developments and their impact
on the needs of advising at UW-Madison
•
Bringing visibility and publicity to projects with broad appeal
If thoughtfully designed, a new organization devoted to academic advising information
resources will make better use of resources and deliver higher quality services. A staffed
organization should be responsible and accountable to academic advisors and students so that
UW-Madison makes sustained progress in advising information systems, and thus academic
advising, in the years ahead.
Thank you for considering these ideas. Please contact me with any questions you have.
Mike Pflieger, Assistant Dean – L&S
608/262-2007
mjpflieger@wisc.edu