Jen Belisle, Advising Resource Coordinator for the Office of Undergraduate Education, had a problem: Ohio State lacked a unified way to document advising interactions. In 2012, this problem had “‘solutions’ all over the place,” says Belise, but none of them worked together. So she called George Abraham, Manager of ASCTech’s custom programming area.

 

“While we've worked on projects like the OSU iPad marching band project [and] the blogging platform that OSU's got, u.osu.edu, this was a different challenge altogether,” says Abraham. “It took quite a while for us to come to grips with abstracting this out from just the college to the rest of the university.”

 

Once his group had created a system that worked across colleges, the program, called AdvisingConnect, became the envy of other colleges, who began to ask about using it. It’s an “an adviser relationship management tool “ according to Belisle, “a beautiful advising, note-taking system that not only advisers use but people across campus also use it.”

 

Ensuring easy communication among these cross-campus people was a central concern for Mike Butsko, a web developer with ASCTech who worked closely with AdvisingConnect, even to the point of using tools he thought were passé. Butsko saw there were “problems getting students to advising appointments from time to time, and so it makes a lot of sense to hit students in a few different ways and one of those ways most recently was text messaging.” Butsko originally resisted using what he saw as an old technology – “we should be pushing forward [with new technologies]…but once we implemented it, we really found that students appreciated getting those text messages as reminders for those appointments.”

 

Visit ASCTech’s YouTube page for videos about its work with AdvisingConnect, starting with the origin of the project and its implementation.

 

If your academic area's advisors would like to learn more about potentially using AdvisingConnect, contact product owner Jen Belisle.