Create an ecosystem for providing high-touch, comprehensive academic advising to improve student success and foster life-time learning.

• Advising platform developed and configured for graduate education
  • Explore the functional needs for an advising platform (done)
  • Develop tools and templates in a centralized platform that students could use for annual self-assessment and faculty could review (connection to the mentoring topic)
  • Explore effect ways to integrate such a platform into a holistic advising approach
• Develop and promote best practices in advising:
  • Examine the correlations between current practices and student success to identify best practices
  • List most common student concerns and a few ideas from successful advisors on how to handle those.
  • Create more coordination between faculty advisors and academic advisors where faculty advisors could refer those students to academic advisors.
  • Examine data that would help to monitor student success (like time-to-degree) and establish procedures to identify students who are falling behind and intervene with advising
  • Create a handbook for academic advisers (to help with consistency and onboarding)
  • Encourage learning circles
  • Develop student skills for effectively interacting with academic advising resources
  • Improve communication strategies to effectively inform students about resources
  • Examine central elements that should be in handbooks for students (covering various topics beyond choosing courses/following curriculum)
  • Explore multi-modal types of advising (asynchronous, at-scale, synchronous, etc.)
  • Explore needs in advising for OMS students [these students are usually in a different place in their careers, and will need different types of advising. OMSA and OMSC already have high-touch advising for administrative and academic type things, but not so much in other ways. There are lots of OMS students, so a small improvement could have big cumulative impact.]
  • Explore ways to serve unique needs of international students [from an international student: “I find searching for resources and advice troublesome. There are many units (OIE, school advisor, career center, etc.), and sometimes (in my experience) they point me to different places.”]
  • Develop practices and framework that considers different levels of unit in plans for implementation depending on needs and scale – schools, colleges, central offices
• Explore AI advising:
  • Training the advisor based on the needs of our students and the resources available