Quality Initiative Proposal for The Ohio State University:
Enhancing Academic Advising at The Ohio State University
Overview of the Quality Initiative
Active participation in academic advising helps to ensure that students succeed and flourish at
The Ohio State University. Advisors help connect students to the university, and students
involved in advising are expected to gain accurate, relevant information to guide them toward a
coherent, meaningful, and well-directed education. An ongoing connection to advising enables
students to make informed decisions related to their academic goals (including the time in which
they seek to complete a degree). A sustained advising partnership will point students toward
appropriate resources and support services that, if effectively utilized, can enhance their
educational and career opportunities. Advising should also help students avoid taking courses
they do not need to complete their degrees. Just as importantly, advising should enable students
to select course work that promotes their academic goals, when course options are possible.
High-quality academic advising is essential to the university’s overarching goals of putting
“Students First” and moving from “Excellence to Eminence.”
To be effective, however, academic advising requires a collaborative relationship between
advisors and students—an active, sustained, and intentional process, rather than passive,
sporadic, and casual contacts. Students should connect with advisors to plan their educational
goals, assess their progress, and consider options, adjustments, and next steps. For their part,
advisors should be well trained, thoroughly knowledgeable about the university—its programs,
courses, and services; its values, policies, and procedures. Since information is essential to
advising, advisors will be able to work with students more effectively if we provide them with
ready access to critical information about students and remove institutional obstacles to the flow
of that information. Until recently, we have done little to identify and assess what, exactly, we
expect from advising, so it should be no surprise that students and the larger campus community
do not always understand what advisors actually do.
The work of advisors and advising units during the university’s recent transition to semesters
provided ample evidence that academic advising at Ohio State is healthy. The effect of good
advising on academic progress was clear. While our continually improving retention rates may
be ascribed to the improved preparation of our students and an excellent first-year program, they
are at least partially due to the efforts of advisors working with first-year students. At this
important juncture—having moved through the semester conversion and, as a result of that
process, having reaffirmed the value of excellent advising—Ohio State is intent on advancing
advising to the next level. To do so, we will focus on the following goals:
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Improving students’ engagement with advising resources
Training and providing professional development for advisors
Defining and assessing the learning outcomes for academic advising
Open Pathway: Quality Initiative Proposal Review Form
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Improving access to information needed to guide and support students
Enhancing collaboration among advising staff, and between advising offices and other
university offices
“Enhancing Academic Advising at The Ohio State University” will be an ongoing initiative. We
look at this as an opportunity to integrate and gain momentum for a number of advising
initiatives already in progress as independent efforts. These include a recently deployed and reenvisioned training program for advisors; first steps toward assessment of the learning outcomes
for academic advising; and communication resources for advisory messages and documentation.
Our interest in boosting our capabilities in student analytics aligns well with an emerging
institutional commitment to business intelligence and data governance and is a critical next step
for any effort to assess the outcomes of advising.
Improving students’ engagement with advising resources. We will begin our advising
initiative with a survey, taking stock of where we are, with an aim toward assessing our highpriority concerns. Through focus groups of students and advisors, we will
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assess the relative strengths and needs of academic advising in the undergraduate units;
determine how best to create an environment in which advising across all six campuses of
the university can thrive and in which advisors and students can more effectively
collaborate in the joint enterprise of advising; and
develop more productive, supportive connections and systems based on our findings.
As we decide on implementations, we will determine how best to measure the results, and make
adjustments and changes informed by those data.
In the course of this initial survey, we will identify practices that seem promising and effective.
What are we doing locally now that we could build on and expand? What might we do that we
are not currently doing? Key to this initiative will be determining strategies for connecting
students more effectively with advising. Some initial steps in this direction were taken during the
course of converting to semesters (mainly, persistent and strategic prompting of students to see
their advisor). But without that sea change as impetus, such prompts have become seemingly less
urgent and, therefore, less frequent. To develop real engagement—to promote compelling
motivation for students to seek and value advising—we need to understand and adjust to how
students see themselves and how they experience the university, understandings that will, in turn,
inform our advising outreach, communications, and materials.
If we need to provide advising suited to students’ needs, we also need to communicate
reasonable expectations for what they should expect from an advising relationship, a partnership
in which they will need to act as engaged participants: generally, an appointment with an
advisor should be a starting point, not a finish line. Ohio State is a large institution, awash with
information. While advisors can be counted on to provide helpful information to students, one
primary goal of advising is to help students learn what they need to know to help themselves
more effectively. To achieve that goal, we need to teach students to recognize when they need
information and to be more skilled in acquiring, evaluating, and using it to answer questions,
solve problems, and advocate for themselves. Developing students’ “information literacy” is key
to the advising relationship.
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Open Pathway: Quality Initiative Proposal Review Form
Training and providing professional development for advisors. High-quality advising
requires well trained advisors, committed to the profession and invested in working with
students. We must do everything possible to design and deliver thorough, effective training, as
well as to provide appropriate opportunities for both ongoing training and professional
development. The training—and its underlying premises of what constitutes excellence in
advising—should derive from our mission and vision, our goals and learning outcomes for
advising.
We also aim to identify any structural, institutional obstacles to effective advising, especially any
impediments to the flow of information to both students and advisors. One central task of
advising is to help students plan degrees, a role currently challenged by the fact that, as one
consequence of the university’s conversion to semesters, neither advisors nor students have
currently reliable information beyond the next term about when courses will be offered.
Since we want, when possible, to retain trained, skilled advisors, we will seek to collaborate with
Ohio State’s Office of Human Resources on a formal review of advising roles, duties, and job
classifications, to identify appropriate opportunities for advancement.
Defining and assessing the learning outcomes for academic advising. We will establish and
begin to assess these learning outcomes using standards developed from the National Academic
Advising Association’s Statement of Core Values of Academic Advising and the Council for the
Advancement of Standards in Higher Education’s Standards for Academic Advising.
Improving access to information needed to guide and support students. Access to student
data is critical for strategic, directed outreach. AdvisingConnect, Ohio State’s current
computerized system for advising notes and, increasingly, for scheduling advising appointments,
is mostly limited to storing information about a student’s advising history. With the emergence
of student analytics as a disciplinary focus, this is the right time to determine how we can use
available data—including, for example, concerns as different as a student’s performance in
critical courses and expected outcomes for different academic programs—to help advisors
interact with and guide students more effectively. Expanding AdvisingConnect to include well
defined queries of student data, providing advisors with a ready means of outreach to well
defined populations, will be one possibility we consider for facilitating more proactive,
intentional outreach.
Enhancing collaboration among advising staff, and between advising offices and other
university offices. All of these efforts will require more effective communication with both
students and advisors. Encouraging collaboration among advising units, advising administrators,
and other student support offices will facilitate the sharing of ideas, adoption of proven practices,
and more efficient processes. Beyond those efforts, however, it is also critical to promote, across
the university, clearer, broader awareness of the role of advising—what it is that advisors do and
do not do (and perhaps should not be expected to do). While generally aiming to teach students
to learn to advocate for themselves, advisors are, both individually and collectively, among the
best advocates students have. Working directly with students, academic advisors are often
positioned to see the problems students encounter as they operate within the university’s
curriculum, programs, and organizational structure. Connecting advisors and students more
closely and regularly will benefit both students and—with willingness to listen, consider, and
adjust—the university and its programs.
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Sufficiency of the Initiative’s Scope and Significance
The academic preparation of Ohio State’s students has increased consistently and substantially
over the past 18 years. The average ACT/SAT score for new first-year students has increased
from 22.8 in 1995 to 28.5 in 2013, a level we formerly considered acceptable for honors
students—students for whom we offered particularly supportive advising. To support these better
prepared students, we have regularly added advising programs and services: a highly successful
First-Year Experience program, Scholars programs with living-learning components,
Undergraduate Research and Service Learning programs, and increased opportunities for study
abroad. Advisors, who have always played a key role in helping students to navigate the
institution, routinely direct students to what is available. For many students, however, advising is
occasional, a service they resort to only when they need help in solving a problem. While that
aspect of advising is certainly important, promoting a more sustained relationship will enable
advisors to help more students take advantage of opportunities to enhance and enrich their
education both in and out of the classroom, based on the student’s goals in pursuing a degree.
In admitting more highly prepared students, we have assumed an institutional obligation to offer
them an education worthy of their talents. We have met that obligation in many ways, but to the
extent that students remain disengaged from advising—and the encouragement and direction, the
ongoing conversation about curricular choices, career goals, and relevant extracurricular
activities that it should provide—their chances to take advantage of those opportunities are more
likely to pass by, underutilized, unexploited.
Impact of the initiative on the institution and its academic quality
This initiative, in all of its aspects, is a commitment to student success and to improving the
quality of the student experience. Connecting students more consistently, in more sustained
ways, with academic advising will better serve the goals and aspirations—the expectations—of
the students we now admit. Providing advisors with more focused data about student
performance, at the level of individual students and the courses they are taking, will enable
advisors to work more proactively with them. Better access to student data will enable advisors
to communicate sooner with students who are experiencing difficulty and might benefit, sooner,
rather than later, from assessing their academic progress or even considering an alternative
academic program. Recurring contacts and more effectively directed communications will help
to involve more students in the high-impact practices (undergraduate research, service learning,
internships, and study abroad, for example) that will provide them with skills, experiences, and
perspectives beyond what they learn in the classroom and improve their preparation for both the
workplace and for citizenship.
In more practical, applied ways, we will seek to improve processes, as well as the information
available to students and the advisors who help support them. For example, a process that could
be enhanced to the benefit of students and advisors alike is as basic as that of course selection
and planning. Our General Education program offers extensive latitude of choice in areas where
a student’s program does not specify a particular course. A significant percentage of the students
who meet with advisors want help with degree planning. With so little history of course offerings
following our recent conversion to semesters, however, advisors do not have much more
information on this than students. Even in subject matter outside their program, course selection
ought to matter to students, and both students and advisors need access to reliable information on
when courses will be offered.
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Open Pathway: Quality Initiative Proposal Review Form
This is the right time for an initiative with these goals. The timing coincides with our developing
interest in student analytics. With the curricular changes that came with our conversion to
semesters, changes that allow considerably more curricular flexibility in some areas, there is
more opportunity and need for advising on course choices, double degrees and majors, minors,
internships, etc. The Committee on Undergraduate Advising, which helped successfully manage
advising during the transition from quarters to semesters, is an ideal group to help manage this
project.
Clarity of the Initiative’s Purpose
Purposes and goals for the initiative
The purposes of this initiative are
1) to enhance the relationship between students and advisors;
2) to clarify for the university community what it is that advisors do—and for students, in
particular, why they should consult regularly with their advisor and what they can expect
from doing so;
3) to develop assessment of learning outcomes for academic advising and training for
advisors, and to articulate the one with the other; and
4) to provide advisors with data and tools to work more effectively and proactively with
their advisees.
How the institution will evaluate progress, make adjustments, and determine what has been accomplished
This initiative is itself a commitment to an ongoing university-wide assessment of advising and
the adjustments that will follow a careful consideration of results. Our initial assessment, which
we will conduct largely through focus groups, will help us
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to determine the most effective ways to communicate with and persuade students;
to continue outreach and communication with specific university audiences and with
parents and families;
to improve the training we already deliver for advisors; and
to determine the initial goals and first steps in improving advisors’ access to information
that will improve their ability to support students.
Following our early communication efforts, for example, we will assess progress to date and
determine how best to continue. We will consult widely as we fix on and roll out additional
processes—training, newly accessible information, enhanced tools—and we will seek
assessment feedback after release to determine appropriate tweaks, adjustments, changes. The
process will be iterative, rather than involving a single definitive release.
Evidence of Commitment to and Capacity for Accomplishing the Initiative
The level of support for the initiative by internal or external stakeholders
This initiative is strongly supported by the Vice Provost and Undergraduate Dean (whose
responsibilities include general oversight for undergraduate advising), the Vice Provost for
Academic Programs, and the Executive Vice President and Provost. It will also enjoy strong
support from the administrators of academic advising units across campus.
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Open Pathway: Quality Initiative Proposal Review Form
Groups and individuals that will lead or be directly involved in implementing the initiative.
Wayne Carlson, Vice Provost and Undergraduate Dean
John Wanzer, Assistant Provost
Jennifer Belisle, Advising Resource Coordinator
Committee on Undergraduate Advising (an advisory committee to the Undergraduate Dean)
Human, financial, technological and other resources that the institution has committed to this initiative.
The Office of University Communications will assist us in developing a communication
campaign. Both the Office of Enrollment Services-Analysis and Reporting, and the Office of
Institutional Research and Planning will provide support for improving access to data. We will
draw on the systems and technology staff in the Office of the University Registrar and on the
Office of the Chief Information Officer for those enhancements that involve changes to the
Student Information System; and on the College of Arts and Sciences Technology Office for
tools delivered through AdvisingConnect. We will consult with the Office of Human Resources
regarding job classifications for advisors to identify a more clearly structured career ladder.
Appropriateness of the Timeline for the Initiative (The primary activities of the initiative and timeline for
implementing them.
At the end of an initial period of assessment, by December 2014, the Office of Undergraduate
Education will collaborate with the Committee on Undergraduate Advising to produce a report
summarizing initial findings and planned next steps. This report will be shared with the
Undergraduate Dean, the Vice Provost for Academic Programs (who has oversight for the
university’s re-accreditation), the Council on Enrollment and Student Progress (a body of the
University Senate), and the Academic Program Advisory Committee (comprised of the Associate
Deans to whom advising offices in Ohio State’s 14 colleges typically report).
Once those plans have been vetted through the university’s governance process, we will begin to
design and develop “content,” along with a timeline and implementation strategy. A
communication plan to promote the value of academic advising and to encourage students to
establish an ongoing relationship with their advisors should be timed to coincide with
orientation, for students entering in the fall, and with the start of autumn semester 2015, for
continuing students, and messages and materials should be developed with those start-ups in
mind.
By early 2015, we will begin to consult with the data stewards on the newly forming Executive
Committee on Integrated Institutional Business Intelligence and Data Governance. We will
identify for them the data we have determined to be critical in working more effectively with
students and assessing the outcomes of advising. Also by early 2015 we will determine and plan
the when’s and how’s of staged delivery and implementation.
The timeline is outlined below:
Autumn 2014:
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Conduct initial surveys (primarily focus groups of advisors and
students, but we will also do a short electronic survey of students to
attempt to measure engagement and advising needs/expectations,
preferences)
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Open Pathway: Quality Initiative Proposal Review Form
Spring 2015:
Start planning and vetting a communication strategy; make adjustments
to the training program for advisors; meet with data stewards to consult
on data needs
Summer/Autumn 2015: Begin to implement the communication plan; develop and plan for
delivery of student analytics
Spring 2016:
Begin the rollout of student analytics
Autumn 2016:
Compare results of advising questions from spring 2013 NSSE
administration with those of spring 2016; re-administer 2014 electronic
survey of students; conduct follow-up focus groups with advisors and
students
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