Navigating Distance Learning: The Future of Online Advising - Adventures in Advising

Panelists Carrie Egnosak, Penn State World Campus; Beth Hobbs, American Public University System; and Katie Bunnell, SPU doctoral student, dive into the evolving landscape of online academic advising. Together, they explore the power of virtual relationships, the challenges of fostering community online, and why representation and research in remote advising matter more than ever. Whether you're new to online education or a seasoned pro, this conversation will inspire you to think differently about connection, support, and the future of advising.

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Transcript

Ryan Scheckel: [00:00:00] All right hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Adventures and Advising. My name is Ryan Scheckel doing a solo mission this time on the podcast. Really excited about our panelists today. Their experience advising in online and virtual formats. It's always a good opportunity to take a perspective that maybe isn't our primary way of looking at the world.

Ryan Scheckel: We're gonna talk about some of what they've learned and their approaches of sharing their perspectives but when we have a chance to listen to the stories of our colleagues who maybe do work in different ways. It's such a treat to get to hear from them and learn from them and really reflect on what we can take away from that perspective and how it informs the work [00:01:00] that we do on a regular basis.

Ryan Scheckel: So we're gonna bring in our panelists. Carrie Egnosak is ringleader of this group in some ways. And they've been doing presentations and talking about virtual and online advising for a while. I'm gonna let them introduce themselves as they go through the process, but what we wanna hear from y'all in your introductions are what's your current role at the institutions and the place that you work and really what's been your journey as Matt likes to say, what's your origin story and higher education?

Ryan Scheckel: So Carrie, we're gonna start with you. 

Carrie Egnosak: Thanks, Ryan. I really appreciate it and appreciate, you and Matt giving us the opportunity to share about remote advising and what we do and where we see things going. So yes. My name's Carrie Agnostic. I am an academic advisor with the Chicken Center for Student Success at Penn State World Campus.

Carrie Egnosak: So that is the online campus of Penn State University. All of our advisors work remotely. Welcome to my living room. And all of our students are completely remote as well, and I'm [00:02:00] one of those folks who is a convert. I guess to say to remote advising prior to the pandemic, I never really had a thought of advising remotely.

Carrie Egnosak: I was one of the last two people to leave our office during the pandemic because I didn't even have internet at my house. I had a computer, I a hotspot if I needed it. So whenever I, had to start advising remotely from home. I didn't know what to expect. And once I was doing it, I realized truly how amazing it was, especially in working with my students because they weren't coming into my space necessarily anymore.

Carrie Egnosak: Like you're not, there's no intimidation of coming into an office of someone you may or may not know, depending on where those relationships are. But I was coming into their living rooms, I was coming into their spaces. And so building those relationships with students in this remote environment has just been [00:03:00] amazing.

Carrie Egnosak: And I've been an advisor with Penn State World Campus now. It'll be four years in, in the fall. But I've been an advisor with Penn State for almost 20. I started off at our Shenango campus which had about a thousand students, completely commuter, majority adult, and then transitioned to our Baron campus.

Carrie Egnosak: Which was majority traditional age student residential. So I've had a little bit of experience across the board in Penn State in terms of student type and location. So that's been my, my higher ed journey. And I'll turn it over to Katie next. She's been my partner in crime since the Portland Annual Conference where we got this conversation started.

Katie Bunnell: That's a pretty good story that we can touch on here in a bit after we're done with introductions. My name is Katie Bunnell. And I was an academic advisor at the University of Alaska Southeast SCA campus for three years before I stepped away to [00:04:00] focus on what I'm currently doing, which is my EDD and higher education administration.

Katie Bunnell: And I am focusing my dissertation on remote academic advising and online distance learning. And so that's how. I fit in to this conversation right now because I'm not actively advising, but I am researching all about it. And so my journey to becoming an advisor is a little wild because prior to the pandemic I was living and teaching English in China, I was in Hung for six and a half years, and then in the.

Katie Bunnell: During Chinese New Year of 2020, I was actually outside of China, just as the murmurings of what could have been an epidemic, started to bubble. My friend actually worked in [00:05:00] news and she was telling me like, no, there's something serious going on. They're just not publishing it yet. And I was like, oh, okay.

Katie Bunnell: I told my family and they said since you're not in China right now, why don't you just come home to Texas and wait it out? I said, yeah, okay. And then next thing I knew, the borders were closed and I couldn't get back, and so then I had to pivot because I needed to figure out what I was going to do.

Katie Bunnell: Decided that I was going to make the jump from teaching to advising, and I applied anywhere and everywhere in the country just as universities were doing hiring freezes and saying, we don't know what's going on, so we're not going to move forward. But I got very lucky with the University of Alaska Southeasts Sitka campus because Sitka is on an island.

Katie Bunnell: And so it was largely unaffected by the pandemic for a lot longer, especially with travel [00:06:00] bans and limiting access to the remote community. When I interviewed, they were very enthusiastic about me moving up there, but they were hesitant 'cause they, because they were like, are you sure you want to move to a little community in southeast Alaska, having never been to Alaska before?

Katie Bunnell: And I said I. I lived in China, how hard could it be? And I've been here ever since. Part of my interview process was they asked a question about online advising. They asked, do you believe that online advisors can have the same type of relationship, emotional impact to advising as in-person advisors?

Katie Bunnell: And at the time I said no, because. I had never had that experience and they hired me anyway, and that was part of the first thing that they wanted to go over in training is saying, your students are going to be online. You're serving students from all over Alaska that [00:07:00] are in remote communities, and online education is the only option for them.

Katie Bunnell: And so you need to figure out how you're going to deliver. A kind, compassionate, welcoming, and mindful service to them while also helping them feel a sense of belonging to our campus. And so from there I got involved in NACADA and met Carrie, and we can go into that in a little bit. So I wanna give Beth an opportunity to introduce herself.

Beth Hobbs: Hello, I am Beth Hobbs. Gosh, I'm trying to think of where to even start with all this. I started in higher education back in 2014. Actually started as a student worker in career services. I. So that's when I decided I did not actually wanna be a nurse. I wanted to be in higher education, so I left that and they gave me a job as their academic administrative assistant.

Beth Hobbs: So I was in a [00:08:00] traditional brick and mortar school down Virginia. From there, I went into student support and then academic advising. Back in 2018, I joined American Public University System, which is both American Public University as well as American Military University as an academic advisor.

Beth Hobbs: And then in 2020 I became a manager here over in the academic advising department. So I work mostly with our school security and global studies. And I just absolutely, I love it. But I help lead our distance advising for online education community, and I just absolutely, I love anything about online advising that NACADA everything.

Beth Hobbs: Really excited just to be able to be here today and just get to talk with everyone here. 

Ryan Scheckel: I think our listeners can hear the common themes. And when we think about the topic of online or distance or virtual advising. I'm curious how the efforts to work together [00:09:00] and to share your perspectives, how they started.

Ryan Scheckel: Can you talk us through how y'all met and when the idea of, hey, we should be doing something to share with our larger professional communities about this, how that came about? 

Katie Bunnell: I'll take this one. The Portland Annual Conference was the first NACADA conference that I was able to attend, and it was also the first one that we were all able to get together in person after the pandemic.

Katie Bunnell: So I brought myself and my two other advisors from the SCA campus and then there were a couple advisors from the Juno campus and we went down to Portland not really knowing what to expect, but super excited to get some sort of insight because we were all pretty green to the job. And. What stood out from the sessions after the first day was how so many presenters and colleagues within the sessions were just expressing [00:10:00] relief.

Katie Bunnell: They were like, oh, thank God we don't have to be online anymore, and that was the worst, or, I'm so happy to be able to see my students in person. Or even griping about, can you believe that students don't even wanna leave their dormitories to come 10 minutes to my office for a session? I still have to zoom with them.

Katie Bunnell: How annoying is that? And I'm sitting there listening to these comments going. This is awkward because that is my job is working online and am I missing out on something? What am I not getting by being an online advisor versus an in-person advisor? And then other sessions talked about the transformative experience of academic advising and how, those conversations that you're having with students regularly, you get to see them grow and develop, and it should not be transactional. And I'm sitting there thinking with my students, I maybe hear from them twice a [00:11:00] year, once at the beginning of each semester to say, what classes do I need to take?

Katie Bunnell: And it's always via email. It's not all students that are like that, but that's, that was the common interaction. And so I'm thinking to myself, am I doing it wrong? Because it feels like a lot of the interactions I have with my online students are transactional, and I'm coming here to learn. So am I not doing what NACADA is promoting to be the best?

Katie Bunnell: Type of advising. So I went to the online advising community and met some of the other advisors and listened to what the topics were of the day, and I stood up and said, I have a question. This is my first conference. I'm still very new to advising, and here's my experience in the sessions. And so I went over what I just vocalized and just asked the room, am I doing it wrong?[00:12:00] 

Katie Bunnell: And the unanimous is no. That is the online advising experience for us. We come to these conferences and we don't really see ourselves represented or our experiences described in the sessions, or we don't always feel like we are seen by the larger NACADA community. And so I got the advice of, you gotta take.

Katie Bunnell: From the sessions, what works for you or adapt what you think you might be able to adapt into an online space and just leave the rest behind. And I said there's surely gotta be a better way. And that's when I was approached by our colleague and friend Sarah Howard, and she connected me with Carrie and said, you two are on the same wavelength.

Katie Bunnell: You need to connect. And so then Carrie and I started talking about maybe we could put together a concurrent session and. So then we got a team together to present in Orlando [00:13:00] and then another team together to present in Pittsburgh, and I can let Carrie talk about what those topics were, the angles we went in order to be able to bring those teams together.

Carrie Egnosak: Just to follow up with what Katie said I think one of the first places that we really started was looking at the. Advising core competencies, right? Because that's what, as advisors we're supposed to be looking to, we're supposed to be following. And when we looked at it, even some of the language didn't support what we do.

Carrie Egnosak: When you say something like, on campus or across campus, I'm a completely remote advisor with completely remote students. There is no physical campus to be on or across. And over the years I had heard. Similar comments from a lot of our two year college and university colleagues that the language didn't necessarily reflect their experiences.

Carrie Egnosak: So that was [00:14:00] one, one of the reasons we focused on the Akata core competencies. It's. The starting point for all things academic advising and we were hoping, to start working on even just the basics of let's change some of the language. And is it remote advising? Is it online advising?

Carrie Egnosak: Is it distance advising? That really depends. Because we are all different. Katie was advising students who were in Alaska who could come and see her potentially. I have students who are all around the world, and again, I'm in my living room, so they're not necessarily coming to find me, although I do have some students here locally who we have gone and, got ice cream at the local place and whatnot.

Carrie Egnosak: But I don't have an office where you can come and find me. And Beth has different experiences as well, with the population that she's advising. The conference presentations that we submitted for Orlando and Pittsburgh, we really wanted to focus on the core [00:15:00] competencies, but also what those look like for all of those different audiences, all of our different colleagues, whether you are in a hybrid position or a fully remote position.

Carrie Egnosak: Or some, combination of students in person, students completely online, whatever that looked like because we wanted to offer. That space to talk. Because if you have attended an annual conference even the advising community discussion spaces, the business meetings, whatever the official title is Beth can correct me 'cause she is currently the chair for the distance advising community.

Carrie Egnosak: But even that short timeframe, like you, you don't get huge opportunities to connect. So we wanted to open that to advisors who like us, had questions and wanted to see themselves reflected somewhere else. The challenge I think that we ran into is that everybody had questions. It was, both of our sessions were, we had [00:16:00] standing room only when we were in Orlando because people really wanted.

Carrie Egnosak: To talk about this. And in Pittsburgh, Beth was on that team. I had to leave early and like Katie and Beth were there talking for I don't know how long after with people. And so that's why we ultimately wanna see this expand hopefully, into a pre-conference workshop because we want that extra time to really dive into these topics.

Carrie Egnosak: Give people useful tools that they can take and use no matter what, what population they're working with or what things look like. And Beth, maybe I'll turn it over to you as chair of the distance advising community to, get your thoughts there too. 

Beth Hobbs: So I think I had a similar experience to what you guys had.

Beth Hobbs: The very first conference I went to was kinda like one of the smaller ones. It was hosted down at George Mason, I believe. And it was pre pandemic. And so during that time it was almost like this ooh, you're the awkward, cousin over there 'cause you're an online advisor [00:17:00] and it was just like the, it's oh, you're one of us but you're not really represented at that time.

Beth Hobbs: Fast forward to Portland conference. That was my first big conference I went to. Absolutely love it. Any listeners here totally recommend you guys go to it. It's fantastic. For me, I, anyways, all of a sudden I was like, alum, celebrity. It felt like I was talking to some people, they're like, oh, an online advisor.

Beth Hobbs: They're like, how do you do it? How do you do this? What do you do in this scenario? What is going on? I'm like oh wow. This is it. It flipped completely, but I do believe we are still very. Unrepresented. We don't have a lot of, opportunities at the conference to speak solely on online advising.

Beth Hobbs: We're, we might give what two, maybe three sessions the entire time that reflect that population. And so it's definitely something that I would love. To just see grow over the next few years. And honestly, I think that is the way we are going. As technology [00:18:00] becomes more prevalent in higher education.

Beth Hobbs: There's more schools that are opening online courses, online programs. We're trying to become more accessible to so many different student populations. So to me it just makes sense that we start seeing. More of that representation, more of that online advising voice at future conferences. And I know that's something that I really am trying to promote.

Beth Hobbs: I was really trying to encourage a lot of those presentations to be submitted this year for our Las Vegas. And I actually think we got a good number of them that were submitted this year. So I'm very excited about that. But I think it is one of those things that we just really need to keep vocalizing.

Beth Hobbs: We are here. This is not, it's really not that much difference. There's some differences, don't get me wrong, but we are just much of an academic advisor as anybody else. It does not matter if you're online. It does not matter if you're brick and mortar. Everybody is welcome to the table, and so I think that's what we really want to promote.

Ryan Scheckel: Yeah, I was struck [00:19:00] by my experience in April when I was fortunate to attend the UKAT conference, the UK Advising and Continuing Conference their 10th anniversary conference in London. And it's really easy to focus on the differences. They use this word and we use that word or they come from this kind of employment structure and we come from this kind of employment structure.

Ryan Scheckel: But more than anything, leaving that experience, I was reminded, it was reinforced for me that we have a lot more in common than we often really indicate. And I was thinking about the advisors that I work with in my office. We still have students who will schedule appointments virtually.

Ryan Scheckel: Even though we are in a physical location on a campus in a very residential, traditional university sense and we have students who take courses entirely online even though they're physically in the same city as us. And we do a lot of advising that isn't in person. Whether it's over the phone, via email or.

Ryan Scheckel: Or in a [00:20:00] virtual format, which we're currently in a transition from our learning management systems. So where we had advised virtually is gonna be different. And I'm mindful of that too. So there, I know there are people who be listening who are like okay, I'm gonna try to translate this for my in-person setting.

Ryan Scheckel: But I, I do wanna encourage everyone to stop and think you do some virtual stuff though. You do some online stuff you do some things that are at a distance. We have a lot more in common than we often give ourselves credit for. We don't have to rehash the entire presentations from Portland and from Orlando.

Ryan Scheckel: But were there any highlights, anything in particular that you, from those perspectives before we talk about what you're planning for Las Vegas? Anything from those sessions and those presentations. That really stood out to you, whether they were things you intended to talk about and they really made an impact or maybe things that were unexpected as a presenter.

Ryan Scheckel: That's one of my favorite things is the stuff that happens that wasn't planned for. So I'm just curious from your recollections. Of [00:21:00] those years now, past events was there anything that really stood out that you wanted to share about those experiences from those presentations?

Beth Hobbs: I guess for me, what I really loved, it was my first time really doing a big presentation. So I was nervous. I had no idea what to expect. Why? I allowed was that yes, people are there coming to listen to us present. Sudden people would be like voicing ideas and they would be helping one another.

Beth Hobbs: And I thought it was a really cool opportunity because we were not just like the. But we were also almost facilitating a conversation at that point because everybody wanted to help one another. Everybody had a resource that they might know of that somebody else could also relate to. And it goes back to what I was saying before, that we don't have a lot of those opportunities during the conferences.

Beth Hobbs: So you could really see how excited people were to like express our concerns, express our ideas, get to share, get to network in that way. And so I left like I was learning things as well, and I just thought that was so cool just to be part of that community and just be [00:22:00] part of that experience. 

Katie Bunnell: And it's those interactions that I think made Carrie and I say, okay, we're ready for a pre-con because there's just not enough time in a concurrent session to be able to have those kinds of workshopping experiences and, in Orlando, we focused on the relational core competency. So like how do you build rapport with students? How do you make them feel connected to you and in, pittsburgh, we were talking about the informational core competency, and so we were thinking that the next one would be the conceptual, but then we said let's just do all three in one pre-conference session and be able to touch on all of them, but embed activities where.

Katie Bunnell: We're providing the participants an opportunity to connect with each other, discuss their philosophies, discuss their tools and tricks of the trade [00:23:00] that they have, either inherited from mentors or had to create themselves because they needed to figure out how am I going to apply these competencies in my situation?

Katie Bunnell: And we just wanted to give people the opportunity to interact and workshop that. 

Carrie Egnosak: And I'd say for me, I think to say one of the surprising things that kind of came from those previous presentations was and that, led into the thought of a pre-conference workshop was really my personal advising philosophy and thinking about has that changed?

Carrie Egnosak: How much has that changed? Or how much hasn't it changed? So especially when we were thinking, through our first presentation, focusing on that relational core competency thinking about how much I believe like in narrative theory with Peter Hagen and the value of a story. And I'm a first generation college student, [00:24:00] so like all of my experiences throughout college, I really, was doing everything new and have kept that in mind throughout my advising career. And so I'm always sharing my story with students, especially whenever there's some point of connection, whether it's being a first generation college student or whenever I was on a physical campus, being homesick to just, changing majors, changing my major three different times whenever I was a student.

Carrie Egnosak: And so I wasn't. I wasn't thinking too much about that whenever I moved into remote advising, but as we got into that conversation, I was thinking how much does that apply? What, from my sort of previous roles still applies now and. Just thinking about it, like my, the value of narrative theory to me exploded because my students are, in the military or their military spouses or they, had something happen whenever they were the traditional age college [00:25:00] student that they're returning 5, 10, 20, 30 years later.

Carrie Egnosak: The 70-year-old student that I had that, family's grown, a husband passed away. She wanted to complete her degree, and so going over statistics with someone who hasn't had math in 50, 55 years, something like that, those stories are really important. So it was still a part of my advising philosophy initially, but now, like it's just exploded so that.

Carrie Egnosak: I, that's what surprised me the most is how much I hadn't necessarily thought about it until we started having these conversations and it was just like. Wow. Yeah, that's a portion that is really expanded for me. I would encourage everyone to think about your advising philosophy. If you haven't written one, definitely get in there.

Carrie Egnosak: NACADA has some great resources for how to write one. But think about how that applies now in whatever world you're working in, and how that might have changed over the course of the past [00:26:00] five, 10 years too. 

Ryan Scheckel: Yeah, I think I think the time that people spend. With the what's often referred to as the pillars the pillar documents of academic advising, the core competencies and the core values, and the concept of advising, but your own philosophy.

Ryan Scheckel: Obviously people who know me and listen on this podcast know where my heart is in that the bigger picture. The philosophical and theoretical and historical, but but it's a lot, it's fair to say everyone should spend time with the core competencies. But there's a lot to go through there.

Ryan Scheckel: And as we've discussed the variations and the small ways of looking at, and the big ways of looking at the work of online advising is a lot, even in a pre-conference session, you had to make decisions what to include and how to go through it. So how did you decide, how did the structure of the proposal and the pre the presentation and the session that you're envisioning.

Ryan Scheckel: How did that come together? 

Katie Bunnell: Like Carrie [00:27:00] was saying, everybody's experiences are different coming to the conversation. So even with the concurrent sessions, we didn't really have topics that we were, that we knew we were gonna talk about until we met the people that were going to be part of the conversation.

Katie Bunnell: And so we usually start with what is your advising experience like day to day? Are you on campus but working with online students? Are you at home working with online students? Are you some sort of I was a community advisor, so I had students who could come in person, or I had students that I was working exclusively online with, and then try to connect those experiences to what it is that we want to impart on our participants.

Katie Bunnell: And so we tried to just use the structure of the core [00:28:00] competencies and the essence of those to guide us and then try to. Connect our experiences and then invite our participants to connect their experiences to what the core competencies are trying to elicit from us. So with the conceptual core competency Carrie was saying you're advising philosophy in our pre-conference, we just to simplify it, asked, does your philosophy change if you're meeting with a student in person versus online?

Katie Bunnell: And if so, why? If not why, or with the relational core competency, what extra extra steps or effort do you need to put into in order to make the student feel like they're being heard or they're being seen, especially if you're only communicating with them via email. Because of time constraints.

Katie Bunnell: They [00:29:00] can only communicate after they get off of work and they're getting off of work at the same time. You're getting off of work and so you don't really answer the emails until you get back in the next day. And so there's a delay. So how do you address. That relationship building in those kinds of contexts and keep it open to the conversation.

Katie Bunnell: Because like with this podcast, you never really know where it's gonna go. And like Beth was saying, you get inspired by what people are bringing to the table. 

Ryan Scheckel: And that was, I was reading over since you Carrie shared the proposal for the presentation the concurrent or the pre-conference session in Las Vegas.

Ryan Scheckel: Las Vegas. I was looking through it and I'm like that there's so much so much, so many hooks, so many places that people can find on ramps and that sort of stuff. I, that my brain would be all over the place in those, that sort of space. And so it's good to have the time. I guess I'm reflecting mostly on the idea that the [00:30:00] different conference session types.

Ryan Scheckel: Have value and purpose which I know has been stated on this podcast before. And it's also reflective of the work that we do with students the right approach for the right thing. But I'm curious, is there anything along the way in, in your efforts collaborating, working together, sharing these perspectives with our broader professional communities and colleagues?

Ryan Scheckel: Is there anything you wish there had been more of? Or more space for, besides representation, but just is there anything that you're like, I wanna see more of this and there's not enough of it out there, not enough scholarship in or not enough work being done in a particular area. 

Carrie Egnosak: I think of scholarship and I think of the doctoral student with Katie doing all of the research that way.

Carrie Egnosak: I think one area we haven't. Tapped too much into you, but I think we've all had questions about, and Beth, I think you said it in the question of how do you do it so I recently had a colleague who was trying to get a remote position [00:31:00] within her office of all on campus advisors. And and she was just asking me questions of things like, how do you stay connected?

Carrie Egnosak: How do you work with your supervisor? How do, how does your. Team interact. And I'm very thankful to be in the Chicken Center for Student Success at Penn State World Campus because we have things like. Coffee chats and tea time chats and regular meetings. A monthly meeting with my individual team and a meeting with my disability reps and a meeting with my our all team meetings that are everyone at World Campus.

Carrie Egnosak: We have fun and formal meetings, but it's a lot of connection still and I think that is a fear sometimes whenever you say remote advising, especially if you, have extroverted tendencies like I do to think I'm not gonna be with people. Yes, you're gonna be with people and you'll have Zoom appointments, like you're gonna be with people just in a different way.

Carrie Egnosak: It's just virtually. So I think that's an area [00:32:00] and I, we haven't tapped into yet, and I don't know the logistics of it of exactly what we would present in that way. But I get a lot of those questions and I think we, we haven't gone quite there yet. 

Beth Hobbs: I agree with that. How to foster like an environment of community within an online environment.

Beth Hobbs: That would be something that I think everyone could really benefit from. Might sound weird. I have a larger sense of community now working virtually than I did when I was on ground. I think I'm probably more connected with people I work with on a daily basis than I was before. And so part of it is just.

Beth Hobbs: I think finding that right fit for you, finding that right group for you, for community and then going from there. But I think that is something that a lot of people have questions about is just like, how do you make connections with students if you don't see them virtually? How do you connect with your peers, either in your department or in others and, foster those relationships.

Beth Hobbs: [00:33:00] And so I think that's something that we could definitely do maybe in future conferences, do presentations just on that. How do you make those connections? Because I think that is what some people have this idea that you go and become an online advisor. Like you're not connecting with your students at all.

Beth Hobbs: You don't know the person in financial aid. You don't know the person who's in the registrar's office, and that could be farther from the truth. You know them very well. From the scholarship 

Katie Bunnell: perspective I see a lot of research when it talks about online learning, focusing more on the pedagogy of teaching online or the student experience of learning online.

Katie Bunnell: But the resources about being an advisor online are very scarce. And so that's exciting for me as a doctoral student because it's ah, a gap in the literature. I can make my mark, I can contribute, but I also know that what I have to say is not the authority. [00:34:00] There are so many other people out in NACADA and beyond who have done this job.

Katie Bunnell: Prior to the pandemic and post pandemic who have experiences and strategies and techniques and philosophies that are well worth sharing. And for this type of work to continue, we do need it to be documented. And so I wanna encourage listeners who feel. Like they want to contribute to pursue a publication, whether it's through NACADA or through Napsa or other journals that deal with higher education issues.

Katie Bunnell: There are a lot of opportunities out there to make your case and convey what the advising experience is like. 

Ryan Scheckel: Yeah I think one of the first things I remember. Was connecting with somebody in what might have been [00:35:00] a voluntary situation when Lockdowns had happened and everyone had moved out of buildings or campuses if they had been there.

Ryan Scheckel: And we were all, so many of us were processing that virtually with colleagues and friends. And there was somebody in the Zoom. Who said something to the effect of, I've been doing this the whole time. And I remember thinking that wasn't necessarily going to be the majority experience but that we might learn a lot from somebody who had that unique perspective.

Ryan Scheckel: And so yeah, for the advisor who's been advising online. Prior to everybody being else, everybody else being asked to or expected to, or forced to. I think there's, there like Katie was saying, there's lots of opportunity to share your perspectives. And I know conference presentations and pre-conference workshops, poster sessions, publications there, there's lots of things out there.

Ryan Scheckel: But I think also speaking up. In rooms and sharing your point of view is also a valuable approach. Katie also [00:36:00] maybe unintentionally mentioned something about this work continuing. And it, it is always a little bit fraught when you try to project, project and predict the future.

Ryan Scheckel: But I'm curious, how do you see online advising, whether it's strategies or competencies or perspectives? Informing the next five to 10 years in higher education. 

Beth Hobbs: I think I guess as somebody who's been working online before, since before the pandemic, and then obviously after I. I, I just think it's really cool.

Beth Hobbs: Right now we're seeing higher education evolve. We're seeing, technology become more prevalent in courses and programs in schools, and I don't think that's going anywhere. My son is in first grade and he has a Chromebook that he's using every day in school right now. So they're starting young with technology right now.

Beth Hobbs: If they're starting doing that, there are kids are gonna grow up there, are gonna have the skills to do online courses, they're going to know how to [00:37:00] handle a class online. They're gonna be used to doing that. And so I don't see it stopping cold Turkey anytime soon. I don't think they're gonna be like, yeah, no, we're done with this.

Beth Hobbs: So I really think this is just gonna be an ongoing conversation and I think it's something that's gonna be really exciting in five years, 10 years, 15 years. I almost wanna say that I bet every student in 15 years, you can't get through a college program without taking at least one online course or at least doing something online because it is starting to become the new norm a little bit.

Beth Hobbs: I also do want just quick throw in there just based on saying that you had said earlier I just do wanna say quick kudos to all of those advisors out there who during the pandemic were quickly thrown from the brick and mortar into the online setting because I know. That can be a huge adjustment, especially if you're not expecting it.

Beth Hobbs: So I just wanna say thank you all for just, continuing on with advising during that time. Yeah, and it's 

Carrie Egnosak: funny timing in terms of that question. The meeting before, the recording of this podcast that I was in, [00:38:00] we have some transitions that are happening across online advising within Penn State and then within Penn State University.

Carrie Egnosak: And so we were talking about. The future of online education. And part of that discussion was that, we are seeing the median age of our students decrease. And so that can provide challenges for folks who have been here since before the pandemic because, folks are used to adult students, and you may have gotten into online advising because you wanted to work with adult or non-traditional students.

Carrie Egnosak: And last year, several colleagues and I created an online course for Penn State for how to interact with traditional age students and. Their parents and for me, who had been advising, traditional age students for the majority of my career, I just thought this is you. This is what we do, what are you nervous about?

Carrie Egnosak: But it's another perspective shift, thinking [00:39:00] about if you got into online advise advising to work with a different student population, what does that mean for you? Because we are seeing this growth and thinking of. Universities as a whole and where we are right now and looking at that, that age cliff that I think everyone talks about with, fewer high school students graduating fewer high school students, looking at colleges and universities.

Carrie Egnosak: I think universities as a whole need to pivot and look outside the box if we're still calling online advising outside the box to, what can we do to help? Can you look at online advising to help balance those, those shifts that are happening that are coming. And also just thinking through kind of the flip of Beth's.

Carrie Egnosak: Thank you. How many of the folks who, whenever the pandemic happened, had been doing this and jumped in to help those of us who never had, Penn State World campus [00:40:00] helped everybody at Penn State because. They've been doing it, for 20 some years already. So they were able to say, yeah, here's what you do.

Carrie Egnosak: Here's how we do this. This is how this works. So shout out to all those folks who have been doing this, forever and helped those of us who at the time had never done it. 

Katie Bunnell: Yeah. Just to echo what Beth and Carrie were saying online. education's not going anywhere. In fact, I can see with funding issues affecting a lot of universities, that online education might even enhance because it is more cost effective for universities to offer online classes or online programs.

Katie Bunnell: There's not as much overhead. With the delivery of those courses, you can fit more students into a class, thus getting more revenue from those students. But what does that mean in terms of student support outside of the classroom? That's where a lot of universities tend to struggle, [00:41:00] which is why online students tend to have higher attrition rates than in-person students.

Katie Bunnell: And so for university administrators recognizing that. The online student population is just as valuable as the in-person student population in terms of investing time, energy, and mindful initiatives designed to serve those students explicitly in their format, in their virtual reality. Then I think we'll see a lot more student retention and completion in those areas.

Katie Bunnell: One of the things that I experienced while I was at the University of Alaska was I actually was able to I received an award from the Board of Regents and I was invited to give, comment at the meeting. And so I sat through chancellors. Talking about how enrollment is going up. They filled the dorms the first time since the [00:42:00] pandemic, or they actually had to convert other buildings into more housing to meet with the demand.

Katie Bunnell: And it was just, it felt like they were only focusing on the students that they could physically see, or the students that could occupy a bed. And for an advisor who doesn't get to see her students like me, it rubbed me the wrong way. And so I used my time to remind the Board of Regents and administration that, Hey, we represent all university students who are attending the University of Alaska, and that includes the ones who do not.

Katie Bunnell: Live on campus. They're the ones who are maybe working multiple jobs or they're a single income household and are doing their classes in the evenings, or are come, like Carrie said, coming back after it didn't work out the first or the second time they tried college and they're still trying to make it [00:43:00] work because they have a dream and they have they have the desire to keep persevering.

Katie Bunnell: Even if it is a start, stop. And I think we, when we talk about online education, we do need to keep that in mind that the students, even though they may not manifest physically in our spaces, they are still individuals who have personalities and needs and require the same kind of care and devotion as the in-person students do.

Ryan Scheckel: Yeah. As we wrap up, I am mindful of how often I think about my parents' generation. My dad in particular he grew up in a setting that didn't have a floor. He had, he grew up in the hills of South Dakota with a dirt floor cabin. He remembers the day they got a radio and how he could listen to radio shows when he was a kid.

Ryan Scheckel: And now he has a smartphone in his pocket. And sometimes I think that must be crazy [00:44:00] to have lived through all that change. And then I think about how, I don't know, 15, 16 years ago I signed up for a massive open online course somewhere. And I was like, this is the future of higher education this online learning deal and how much things have changed and in some ways how things haven't changed.

Ryan Scheckel: But one of the things that I know is the advising community at large is gonna be there to help support us as we sort through it. And I so glad to have spent time talking with y'all today to have seen you allall part of this community and to have you on the podcast as panelists.

Ryan Scheckel: Whether you think of it this way or not being leaders in the conversation is it's critical to have folks like you in our community. And so thanks so much for being on today and for sharing your perspectives. But Carrie, Beth and Katie, thanks so much for being here today. We really appreciate it.

Katie Bunnell: Thank you for having [00:45:00] us.