How about Advising via Web Conferencing?

Go, Parkland College! This community college has seen online classes take off in the last ten years, and student services didn't want to leave those students out of what they had to offer. They use Adobe Connect because faculty and students liked it, it was less intimidating, customizable, flash-based with nothing to install, and affordable! You can pop in and out with ease, too.

For advising, they schedule their appointment online from the tutorial, click the time, get an automatic tutorial, and have a link that takes them right into the meeting. Both have access to shared screens so the advisor can demonstrate things. It has received rave reviews.

True, advisors resisted. Online?! Ugh. They felt overworked already. And it was unknown. So, they got an early adapter, and she then trained the others. Some students don't have cameras, but it's fine. It's also used by their writing center for tutoring, and they do it as a drop in. Students go to a "waiting room" after ringing a doorbell (they have fun with this). It gets a little awkward when the faculty has audio and can be heard, but the students just chat back, but it's not that bad. They go off line for the summer, and come back in the fall. Students can't always figure out screen share, so faculty just have them upload documents for review. Faculty can be washing dishes at home, hear the "doorbell," and go to their computer to help the students.

Help was needed because people forgot passwords, etc., but most issues were dealt with a phone call or email. Otherwise, they've staffed a helpdesk that deals with Adobe Connect issues. The student experience has been very positive and most would highly recommend it. Then the tech genius tells us how he integrates it into the student system and I'm completely humbled and lost. He created the doorbell so faculty didn't have to stair at their blank screens waiting for students. He gives us the code.

So, maybe it's even simpler to use Skype or Google chat and share with Google docs . . . They'd rather pay the fee because they need to know that the person they see is their student. That's why they log in. They found no need to market it for academic advising other than being on their web page. For the writing, they did need to put an ad on their equivalent of Blackboard.

Photo by kuljuls.