The Fresno City College spring semester is underway and lines at student services are out the door. Waiting rooms are full, students sit for hours, and counselor’s schedules are booked solid. Student enrollment is up about 15 percent and they’re all being unloaded on the same number of counselors as last semester.
And with the budget the way it is, there won’t be any new counselors hired anytime soon. What brings so many students to the counselors? Mostly class registration, changing their majors, and acquiring their grades and/or transcripts. What’s surprising is that all the aforementioned services, and several others, that students are seeking help with any computer with an internet connection.
The majority of students, new and returning, don’t know this. They have never been introduced to WebAdvisor, an online system powered by Datatel designed to help students of California community colleges. With WebAdvisor, students can search for and register for classes, drop classes, make payments, view grades and transcripts, and change their majors all online by themselves.
This is a major concern for Honors Counselor Jill Harmon. “Students will sit and wait for two hours to change their major,” Harmon says. “We need to teach students how to help themselves.” Part of the problem, she says, is that most of the students are of an “auditory generation” and are used to having things done for them or at least being told exactly what to do. Students straight out of high school, where class registration is virtually done for them, find themselves in college and have no idea where to start. “But we don’t have time to baby them,” Harmon explains.
That’s where WedAdvisor comes in. Students can register themselves for classes at their own convenience, so the counselors can focus on helping the students who really require one-on-one time to discuss serious issues. But there is a large number of students of all generations who don’t know how to use WebAdvisor, or even know that exists. Some students have said that they can’t because they don’t know how to use WebAdvisor and they don’t know where to go to learn.
Harmon hopes to help remedy this situation by banding together with her colleagues to establish a booth where teachers and counselors could give a brief crash course in WebAdvisor. Another idea of Harmon’s is to have a “web day” where teachers take a few minutes out of their class time to explain the system. Unfortunately, with larger classes, not too many teachers are immediately willing to stray too far from their lesson plans.
