Effectiveness of Online Advising on Honors Student Retention and Engagement

Abstract

Academic advising is an important component of a student's education, and more often universities are turning to technology to aid in this task. This paper presents a case study of an online advising system that complements a university degree audit system by providing honors students and advisors up-to-date details on individual progress towards completing the honors curriculum and on the level of engagement in the honors co-curricular programming. By leveraging the features of Google Apps for Education, this advising system allows faculty and students to securely and easily access accurate information during schedule planning, and frees up honors staff from repetitive tasks allowing them to dedicate more time to helping students plan their educational journey. Effectiveness of this new system is measured by accuracy of information, time spent by the administration in maintaining the system, student retention and completion of the honors curriculum, and student engagement in honors co-curricular programming. The Google Script described in this paper can be adapted for mail-merge and automatic web page generation in several educational settings beyond academic advising.