Adrian Suarez Avila/ News Director
A new feature has been added to the PantherSoft Faculty Center that will facilitate communication between faculty and academic advisors.
The program aims to allow faculty members to contact advisors as a form of early intervention for students who are identified as struggling in certain courses.
According to Dr. Douglas L. Robertson, dean of undergraduate education, the Early Alert feature is part of the University’s Graduate Success Initiative, a specific brand of academic intervention to help students succeed.
Consisting of four main objectives, the Initiative involves helping incoming students identify a major early, providing a clear path to help students meet the requirements for the major in question, providing feedback about progress toward the academic goal and removing barriers on the road to graduation.
While the feature is now available for use by professors teaching all types of undergraduate courses, an early alert system was already in existence for a number of specific courses.
The alert system built upon one that had already been developed as part of the Title V grant with the college algebra course.
The Title V grant, generated by the government, was received specifically to improve student success in college algebra, as the course had a high predicting value of whether the student enrolled would graduate on time or not.
Some time after the University received the grant, it was discovered that if a student failed college algebra, then he or she would be 75 percent less likely to graduate on time.
The system was later expanded to include other sets of courses: first year experience and English composition courses.
The system was then tested for gateway courses.
Among the were gateway courses, those that go toward meeting the University Core Curriculum requirements and are common prerequisites for other classes, such as college algebra, finite math, general biology and principles of macroeconomics, among others.
Since the software already existed, it just needed to be modified to fit other course groups.
One of the intended purposes of the Early Alert system is to provide a manner of intervening early in the academic career of a student that a professor deems to be at risk for failing.
Professors using the feature will be able to navigate between different columns of academic progress, such as attendance and assignment completion.
Robertson believes that faculty members are just as responsible as students.
He admits that although the feature will go a long way to help ensure student success, faculty participation is optional.
Rather than wait until the midterm or final examinations for information on the students’ progress to be gathered, Robertson believes that faculty members should be proactive in providing early progress reports of students in order to better identify which ones should be contacted by advisors.
Ideally, the alert should be made within the first three to four weeks of the semester, according to Robertson.
In order to develop the program, the department of Undergraduate Education, along with different members of the University community, such as those within the College of Arts and Sciences, where all of the Title V gateway courses are housed, met with University technology services.
The program took less than two months to finalize, and it went live on Jan. 20.
While all students can walk in to speak with an advisor in regards to their academic progress, each student is assigned a specific advisor at the moment of enrollment into a specific major.
This policy, however, was not employed until 2012, Robertson said.
At present, the University boasts an advisor-to-student ratio of around 400-to-one, a significant drop from a previous ratio of around 1000-to-one, all due to the University’s efforts of hiring more advisors to serve the student population.
Some students believe that the program doesn’t hold much promise.
Even if an advisor notified of a student’s at-risk performance contacts a student, the decision of whether or not to meet with the advisor rests with the student.
“I don’t think it’ll do much,” said Laura Fernandez, a junior architecture major. “It’s likely that a student will be called in to speak with [his or her] advisor and they will just ignore the advisor’s request.”
Robertson admits that while advisors have many ways of reaching out to students, such as through text messages, emails and phone calls, they can only do so much to ensure that a student pays them a visit to discuss their progress.
There is a certain point at which a student’s sense of responsibility must kick in.
Other students, however, actually believe the Early Alert feature will yield positive effects.
“Every school should have this type of technology,” said Abel Tomlin, a junior mechanical engineering major. “This makes it a lot easier, more streamlined, for a professor to lead students to make the right decisions when they are struggling in class.”
Robertson says that the current step is to educate faculty members about this feature available to them, to encourage them to make active use of it.
Robertson admits that several people have commented on the program, saying that they wish something of its kind had existed when they were undergraduate students.
He confessed that, if something like the Early Alert system had existed when he was in college, it would have helped him focus more on learning than on trying to get to an advisor, learn the policies of academic performance or figure out what classes to take.
While failing courses has a negative impact on one’s academic record, Robertson believes that it can also have detrimental psychological effects.
He provided the example of an incoming freshman student who has doubts about whether or not college is for him or her.
If the student fails a course, then his or her doubts will be confirmed, leaving a psychological impact about academic abilities.
If the University can keep students from having these bad experiences, particularly during the first and second semesters, then students may increase their chances of succeeding academically.
“I have no doubt that more students are graduating on time and will graduate on time,” Robertson said in regards to the University’s efforts to ensure student success.
As part of its efforts to help students, the University did away with the 2+2 model, one in which students would be assigned a lower-division advisor for their freshman and sophomore years, and a different advisor dealing with them during their junior and senior year as upper-division students in their specific majors.
While he admits that the Early Alert feature is a step in the right direction, Robertson says that the department of Undergraduate Education still has work to do.
The long term goal at present, is to have all courses, especially gateway courses, on a learning management system, such as Blackboard.
Faculty will be able to enter data points early, and the computer will have an algorithm that will read the data points and send out an automatic alert to an advisor.
“It really communicates that in this big place, where it’s easy to get lost, people are paying attention to your welfare and they care,” Robertson said.
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