Advising at Scale: Rethinking Advisor Professional Development - Adventures in Advising

What does it take to build meaningful, scalable professional development for academic advisors across an entire university system?

In this episode of Adventures in Advising, Matt and Ryan pull back the curtain on a remarkable systemwide effort within The University of Texas System: the creation and launch of the Fundamentals of Excellence in Academic Advising learning modules. Joined by Angelica Barrera, Weston Rose, Dr. Heather Smith, and Dr. Rebecca Karoff, the conversation traces this initiative from early vision to implementation, highlighting the collaboration, trust-building, and intentional design required to support advising at scale.

Listeners will hear how system leadership partnered with campus practitioners, how advisor voices shaped the curriculum, and how flexibility was preserved across diverse institutional contexts. Along the way, the guests share lessons learned, early outcomes, and insights for other systems seeking to elevate advising as a profession and a cornerstone of student success.

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Hello, and welcome back to the Adventures in Advising podcast. Matt Markin here along with Ryan Scheckel and think we have a great episode per usual ahead of us today, and it's actually related to something remarkable going on across the University of Texas System. Ryan, there's always the question of, how do we provide meaningful professional development to academic advisors? And sometimes the question is, how do you do that, not just in one department or one institution, but maybe across a whole system. What goes to your mind when you hear that?

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, the idea that it takes a village, you know, I know that that phrase is a little bit of a meme or a trope or a cliche, but, but the reality is, especially with institutions of our complexity and size the nature of the students that we're working with, sometimes a significant administrative buy in and institutional or system based approach might be the best strategy, especially when those strategies are flexible enough to be adopted at institutions and campuses and locations based on their sort of unique situation, too. So I'm thrilled to have a party. You know, we got four guests today, and and love hosting people, especially when we get to bring everybody together all at once. That's super cool, too.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, so today's conversation, maybe we'll be able to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit on that system wide effort, maybe how things came together, maybe what It's teaching us where it's headed next. So we are thrilled to be joined by individuals who have shaped this work from vision to reality. So let's go ahead and bring our guests on at this time and welcome friends we have Angie Barrera, Weston Rose, Dr. Heather Smith and Dr. Rebecca Karoff, welcome to Adventures in Advising.

Matt Markin  
And before we jump into all that fun and discussing all of that, I think it'll be great to kind of hear from each of you to tell us a little bit about your higher ed journeys and where you're at today. And I'll just kind of pick on someone, and then we'll kind of go from there. Angie, you want to go first?

Angie Barrera  
Well again, thank you, Matt and Ryan for having us today. My journey. Wow, that's going to date me. I started my higher education journey, actually, when I was a grad student at Texas A&M University Kingsville. I always was brought in to help our athletic trainers and our student athletes with scheduling, ensuring that we could make things happen. So I quickly found a passion in higher education, but quickly then looked at, you know, my own personal journey. I got my first opportunity as an academic advisor at Texas A and M, which is where I actually started my education. But so from A&M, I quickly transitioned, not quickly, but I was recently married at the time, and my husband couldn't find a job in the area, so we were living in two different cities. But from Texas A&M, I went back to Texas A and M Kingsville, transferred over, had a stint there, then landed at Texas A&M San Antonio, which was a system School of Texas A&M Kingsville. Great opportunity years later came about at Texas State University. I was at Texas State University, and then I flew back to San Antonio, and I'm here at UT, San Antonio, which is very hard for me to say, so I had to write it in that caption. But you know, in in that whole transition, academic advising has been my anchor, whether I remained an academic advisor, one two director or Executive Director or at a VP, academic advising has always been near and dear to my heart. And I always tell people I will never let it go. That's That's the true hat that I wear, and I enjoyed each and every day, wonderful.

Matt Markin  
And I can definitely relate to that two city thing. Heather, how about you?

Heather Smith  
Well, I'm Heather Smith. I'm at the University of Texas in El Paso UTEP, way out at the West tip of Texas, closer to San Diego than Houston, and I have been invited in advising my entire career, kind of unexpectedly. I finished degree and was going to become a literature professor, and somebody said, Do you want to help advise athletes? I had no idea what that meant. So my very first job was being an advisor to advise athletes and help UTEP get out of a major. Infractions case back when the NCAA still cared about infractions anyway, so I was the advisor for student athletes. I helped build the first academic center for student athletes on the UTEP campus. And have been at UTEP for 28 years in June, and had all kinds of opportunities in the world of advising and student success, to build and grow from the athletics piece into the general student population, to provide access and opportunity to quality advising for our students, and that's what I do now, is oversee a campus wide advising model that seeks to provide every student personalized advising, from admissions to graduation. So yes, like Angie, advising is near and dear to my heart, and I will not argue stuff awesome.

Matt Markin  
So that's our continuing theme, seems like. So Rebecca, you're up next.

Rebecca Karoff  
Thank you, and I'm really so pleased to be here. Thank you so much, Matt and Ryan. And also great to be in this, this virtual room with incredible colleagues from UTEP UT San Antonio and my own colleague, Weston rose. I don't have a history in advising, I actually, but I do have a history of working in university systems, system offices, and it's in some ways, most of my professional career has been spent in two systems of higher ed, but I started with a PhD in comparative literature like Heather. I thought I was going to be a faculty member, but I quickly decided, for personal professional reasons, to sort of find ways to work in higher education administration. I worked for the University of Wisconsin System for 21 years in a variety of roles focused on student success and academic strength and faculty success. And then 10 years ago, I moved to the University of Texas System. And I will say, when I got to Texas, I was like, oh, gosh, this state is big. And not only does there, does it have one large university system like mine, which has, you know, we have over 260,000 students right now in 13 institutions. It also has six other systems, including Ryan's at Texas Tech. So that was that kind of was mind blowing, just the kind of platform, the giantness of the environment, but also the opportunity. So I, as an Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, I work on a lot of different student success initiatives, advising, being one of my favorite but also work on things like transfer, on Open Educational Resources, on curricular redesign, on the faculty role in student success, and lots of other things. But I will say that one of the things for me is the opportunity we have in the University of Texas System, across the state of Texas. It's a demographic opportunity. It's an opportunity to advance the lives and transform lives of our students. Help them achieve inter general and intergenerational wealth. Help them, you know, achieve that kind of social, social and economic mobility that I think we strive for. And while not a native Texan, I'm from Massachusetts originally, I love Texas public higher education. I can't imagine a more dynamic place to be doing the work we're doing.

Matt Markin  
Definitely hear the passion from not only Rebecca, but everyone else so far and last but not least, Weston. 

Weston Rose  
My name is Weston Rose, and I'm a senior program manager in the Office of Academic Affairs at the University of Texas System. I began my career at Sam Houston State University as an undergraduate. I was an undergraduate assistant in the Department of English, and actually one of my jobs was to help advise majors and minors so students would come in, and I had, as a first generation student, I had, I hadn't even completed a degree, and I was helping people to navigate the higher education landscape. But after getting my master's degree, when I was working as an adjunct at shsu, I also got a job working as an academic advisor, and I just really loved the job. It was one of my favorite jobs. So years later, when I joined UT System and started working with Rebecca on academic advising. It was just so fun to continue that good work.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, fantastic. You know, Rebecca, I didn't grow up in Texas either. I was born in South Dakota, and one of the things that I learned along the way is I can tell people I wasn't born here, but I got here as soon as I could. That helps for the native Texans. And we're going to start with you, Rebecca, just you know, give us the sort of the lay of the land, what initially sparked the idea for the fundamentals of excellence in academic advising, the project and and what role did system leadership play in sustaining momentum and institutional buy in for that work?

Rebecca Karoff  
Thank you. Love that question. It's actually got a long, 10 year history in terms of the answer, but I will say this, so I think the idea for the fundamentals in academic advising course came from our institutional core. Colleagues and people in this this room, but also elsewhere. And in some ways, the 10 year history includes as a system person. And this also answers that second question about the system leadership. If you you know, in some ways my job is all about building relationships collaboration and capacity and trust, and if I don't have trust and good relationships with people at the institutions, not much is going to happen. And so that's been something that I've been both, I think, proud of and just so grateful to all these incredible institutional colleagues who make that actually easy to do. So the the the fundamentals, course, is sort of, in some ways, the culmination a real signature process project for things that we've been doing for quite a while, and we have built, one of the goals we had early on was to really understand and understand advising as a profession that requires the kind of support, development and nurturing that other professional identities have. So that was, I think, one of the major impetuses. But always, we want to be responsive at the system level to our institutions. Really listen to them. What do they need? What do they you know? What do we do to create that culture of collaboration? We can convene at the system level. We can provide some resources, and we have for advising, although not like millions of dollars, but sometimes just targeted pots of money, go a very long way. So we've been really quite proud of what we've been able to do, using advising as one of the key levers for removing barriers in front of students as they try to progress through our institutions, ensuring clear pathways and working very hard to close gaps and outcomes. So I'll stop there, because I know we'll have some other questions that will also address some of the history of this particular project.

Matt Markin  
Basically, it's that foundation, and I like how you say trust, because that's going to be very important on how you build those collaborations. And it seems like that has that was something that was inputted in this of course, Angie, I'm going to throw this question to you, because a lot of times we end up just seeing the final product. But talk to us about maybe, how did this partnership between advising leaders, system leadership and the learning experience? How did that influence with the final product?

Angie Barrera  
Oh, they were all influential. But I also do want to add one, one population was our advising community, right? I think that was a consistent topic in our conversations, because we all sit on a council that Dr Kirov has, and that was one of the consistent messages, I hope my colleagues, but I always tell them I speak as a practitioner and of advising that through through the lens of an advisor, this is what we need to do and build so it was extremely important that in building this module, that we understood the needs of our advising community, but we also needed our campus leadership to to be the voice to help us with, you know, strategic planning, to help us understand the needs of each each campus, because we're we're uniquely different, and we knew that we did not want to build a training that was, you know, Part A, Part B, Part C, with each of our campuses. But what can we bring together in this training with our students at the forefront of our work? So it was essential to have our our advance, our advising, leadership team members be able to provide us that information. I think one of the other essential pieces that we talked about, and I'm so glad that we were able to bring her to this team, was Maya, her and her expertise. She was our learning experience designer. We just had so much feedback from her through our lens. So because we were talking through our experience, right, either our personal experience and advising or through the needs of what our leaders were telling us, but she was really able to morph our ideas and our story so that we had an engaging platform. So it was really, really, it was great conversations with her, and we all kind of looked at each other and like, oh, we wouldn't thought about that. So we were really, really happy that we were able to bring her to the team, because she really, definitely changed the dynamic, changed our thinking as we were bringing together the curriculum that we were assigned. So each of us on the subcommittee volunteered or were voluntold, different components that we decided were important in this module. And then, you know, we worked together to bring all those topics and our thoughts and our, you know, maybe personal experience. Is in order to achieve and bring together the curriculum for the module?

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, I think sometimes, I think folks at higher education institutions forget that they have experts in the project that they're thinking about starting, that they could consult and bringing in an instructional designer, especially when you're developing a course and modules and learning outcomes, I certainly know that's outside of my scope of expertise. For sure, Rebecca, coming back to you and learning about this project, I was wondering how the UT Systems framing of advising as a core pillar alongside finances and belonging, shape the vision for the learning module.

Rebecca Karoff  
It did very much, and it really speaks, in some ways, to the history and that trajectory of where we are now, to having this course that was built over the last several years and then is now being offered to all professional advisors across the system. But we, we did, you know, when I first got here, we didn't necessarily have a student success framework, and one of the things I did was convene affinity groups around what we did identify as three pillars, financial well being, academic and social belonging and advising articulated as commitments to our students. And just convened about 65 institutional colleagues. Heather was a part of the work. I don't Angie, I don't think you were in western you hadn't been hired yet, or maybe in the process of being hired. But just getting again, that the opportunity to listen to, what do people need so fine. And we have these pillars. How do you operationalize that? How do you operationalize what that commitment to students and advising looks like in a way that, you know, building something that Auntie said, you can't have this one size fits all approach to nine academic universities and very different cultures, context, student population. So we worked hard to think about what are the stepping blocks needed? In some ways, some of it was serendipitous. I won't say that we planned. We didn't do a backwards design that said, in, you know, in eight or nine years, we're going to have a fun an online mod set of modules for all advisors to take. But again, we did a lot of listening. We did a lot of building together. We convened several advising institutes as a means of providing professional development for our art advisors. But one of the things about that was always you can't scale that professional development. Even if you end up with 100 people at the at the at the institute, you're still not scaling advising. So there was always that interest, how do we scale advising excellence? How do we make it sort of replicable, sustainable and institutionalizable? Along the way, in these last several years we developed something in in response to the advising pillar, we developed a fivey framework for advising excellence. And I'm not going to get the five B's, but maybe one of my colleagues like elevate and and educate, and I can't even remember, but it, but it was, it was just a very solid power. Thank you. You'd think I would have these if I had but so we had the 5e framework that was like, you know, probably seven years ago, and then about six years ago, we said, Well, okay, great, we have a framework. How do we know we're actually meeting, adhering and offering and ascribing and building capacity in each of those five aspects of excellence? So we designed a rubric, and this was all very collectively done. Angie referenced an academic advising Leadership Council, which has been convened in the last few years. And even before that, there were sort of predecessor groups with some of the same people. And we said, let's design a rubric that was actually a paid one year project that we were able to stipend leaders of that work, including Heather and professional advisors, and advising leaders to say, let's develop a rubric that helps us self assess, informative, not punitive or summative ways how we're doing in that regard, that rubric is now an annual survey that we give at each of our institutions to advisors, to sort of say, Let's self assess, again, for continuous improvement purposes, not punitive, not to not and it's sort of at an institutional level. It's not about individual advisors. So from the rubric, we then realize we're still not hitting the scale we want. We're still not providing some of that sort of system wide shared, valued and shared responsibility, sort of professional development that we were still aspiring to, and the idea was launched for the modules project, and that has been, I think, really very powerful. And I'll stop there, because I know my colleagues will be able to describe a little bit in greater detail what the fundamentals, course, is like, how it was developed, the collaborative development process and all that. And it was, it was a couple year process. Again, we were able to provide some funding to the leaders of it. But like, it went on way longer than anyone wanted. And I was just so grateful that, in. Ways that people on the development team just they couldn't be done. They were like, wait, wait, we're not done. We're like, oh, it's probably great. And like, no, no, we got to keep meeting. We know it's past the time the funded period, all that other stuff, but the dedication to providing this incredibly strong program was really phenomenal.

Matt Markin  
Sometimes it takes that little bit of extra time, but you know, you you brought people to the table, you asked questions, you listened. Weston, I want to bring you in. You know, we've been hearing about partnerships and collaboration. How did cross institutional collaboration? How did that look like in actual practice when you're developing these modules? And what do you feel has made it successful?

Weston Rose  
Well, in practice, cross institutional collaboration for our project was iterative, and it involved many conversations and thoughtful approaches from our team members. But I think what made it successful was the individual strengths that each of our team members brought to the table. Angie alluded to our instructional designer, Maya, all of her expertise, but Angie also brought a ton of a wealth of knowledge. As you know, a leader in academic advising in Texas. And Heather likewise, brought so much to the table. She had worked on developing the academic advising rubric, which is part of our work. And she had been through this exercise working with academic advisors to revise that and get it correct. So we we sort of had a template in a way of how to run a group like this. But I will say that we've mentioned the academic advising Leadership Council at UT System. These are advising leaders across our nine academic institutions, and we sourced our working group members from that from those that group. So we had representation from UT, Austin, UT, Dallas, UTEP and UT, San Antonio. And what we did was we met. We did a kickoff meeting in January 2024 where we came together. We drafted community agreements on how to best work together, we scoped the number and purpose of each module, and we just came up with our project plan. And then we met monthly for an hour and a half virtually to keep the work on track, but we also strategically scheduled about four in person meetings, two in Austin, one in El Paso and one in San Antonio, so that we could come together supercharge the work. It was really important to be in the same physical space, because a lot of our team members are very important on their campuses, so it's really good for them to be able to step out of that daily grind and for all of us to come together and have those rich conversations, to develop that curriculum.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, I know the nature of our conversation today is going to be a lot more process oriented, and there's going to be a lot to think about and consider, just thinking about, how does it go from an idea to something that's actually implemented? But for our listeners and viewers out there, I really encourage you to check out the rubric. Lots to chew on in there. Just we could talk on any one of those line items. I saw one in particular, just like we were just talking about that the other day. But Heather, I want to ask you, in sort of more of a general sense, what have you all done to balance? Because I know consistency across the system is a goal, but also maintaining a flexibility for advisors who might have those very different institutional contexts. What have you all done to try to reach that balance?

Heather Smith  
So throughout the process, we we talked a lot about that in our advising Leadership Council amongst ourselves with Rebecca that, as we mentioned earlier, our institutions are very different and serve a variety of demographics and are in different sizes and all across this fabulous, large state of Texas, but it was important for us to establish a shared set of values about what advising excellence was and what it would mean to be an advisor in the UT System, whether you were at UTEP UT San Antonio, Boston, our flagship or UTRGV, and so we worked through, actually, through the rubric understanding, as Rebecca mentioned, we did. We did that survey. We turned it into a survey. Because you can imagine, when we initially implemented the rubric, there was a little bit of anxiety and angst about, how is this going to be used, and so on. And so we turned it into the survey, which has provided us valuable feedback about what is happening on our campuses and trends and so on. And that's where this professional development interest, I mean, it was just that was top of mind all the time from our advisors. And so, as Angie mentioned, we. We We talked to our advisors on our campuses, and we talked amongst the leaders. We talked amongst our leadership council about what were the fundamental values that we could say are shared across the system, no matter where we are, what city, what campus, to ensure that if you are an advisor in the UT System, this is what you would want to know. Need to know what we would hope you would know to be an excellent advisor and to continue developing professionally.

Matt Markin  
Just think about it. So much work and so many conversations that had had to be had up until this point. So Angie kind of going back to you now we're at, let's say we're at the launch process. What did that look like across the UT System, and anything that was learned early on?

Angie Barrera  
Oh, definitely, I would say, before the launch. Early on, our biggest conversation was we need to pilot this to a group of individuals before a launch, right? Because we've been in our little rabbit hole developing, whether it be monthly or in our great visits on our campuses, but we wanted to make sure that we were actually creating what we were we were thinking about. So we needed other lenses in there. And so what we did is that we went back to our council, and we asked our advising leaders to identify and we gave them X amount of number of slots to identify advisors, and we wanted our advisors to pilot this. And so we set out the pilot this past summer. So we piloted out. We had decided we were going to do about two weeks. Of course, we know orientation is going on. We knew we were going to have to deal with that gamut, but there is no downtime for advising. We knew that, but we had our target. We wanted our goals, and so we were able to extend that. So we had a three week opportunity. We definitely we sent out the modules to 50 participants across all of our institutions, and then we got our return was for we had 4046 completed. So we had a 92% completion rate. And with that 92% with those 46 people who did everything we asked them to, we had great feedback, The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, like the things that we were thinking were working great, but we didn't think of some other things. So we took all of that information from July. So we had September, July, we had August, to try to turn those things around. And we did. We worked really hard to utilize that feedback and then to deliver the things that the advisors told us like they either they wanted clarity, they wanted additional case studies, or maybe something wasn't working for a specific advisor. In addition to that, we gave the advisors an opportunity with that feedback to say, hey, is there something you want to tell us? Us that that have sat down and created this, and we did have some advisors who said, yes, we want to speak to you. And we thought, oh, okay, what did we just open? But again, so we, we had a small focus group. We all we came to the table, we talked to them, and it was all positive feedback. Really, it was thanking us for taking the time to do this. Thank you for for allowing their voice in there. And so it was a really unique opportunity for us to utilize that information to go in to make adjustments. And then we still hit our target. We launched it. September 16 of 2025, we issued an email out to all of our advising leadership. So this is how it rolled out. We sent the information about the module and its access to all of our advising leadership, leaders across of our campuses. Then they had their plan of action on how they were going to launch it to their their team in their community. So it was their autonomy to do and launch that how they wanted to. What we have been doing to help them out is that we have been following up so we can see how many people have started. We have see, we do see how many people have completed. And then Weston and I and Maya meet to discuss that we provide that data to the council or individuals who sit on that leadership team, in case they want to, you know, spark conversation with their community or give them kudos for having X amount of these modules done. One thing I don't think we mentioned is in this year, we're giving every advisor, whoever we deemed advisor in our advising community, the opportunity to go through this module. So it didn't it didn't matter if you were in year one or year 25 you have access to this. Module, and you can provide us feedback. One of the things that we did see as we do have turnover in our institutions, you know, nationwide, we saw some lagging in our institutions that had had some leadership. So then Wesson and I stepped in to offer, you know, some guidance, to say, Hey, we've noticed that your numbers aren't quite where some of the other ones are. Would you like us to meet with your advising community? And so we have had people say, actually, yes, please come in and talk to our community. And so we were able to do that and engage. We are paying attention to the numbers, and you know, we're getting, you know, the feedback that that we want, and hopefully we'll be able to do some more with that feedback.

Ryan Scheckel  
It's fantastic, you know, I am also reminded that not only do we have experts at our institutions and our communities for the projects we have in mind, but we're also learning institutions, and we can start small and scale up and share our results. And speaking of results, I know Andy talked a little bit about some of the numbers, but Weston, how are people doing? What have been the results so far? Are there any other metrics that y'all are watching most closely, or why are you focusing on the things that you're focusing on?

Weston Rose  
Absolutely so we looked at the data, and as of January 14, 2026 there are 254 enrollments in our modules, which represents about 35% of the advisor population system wide. There are over 700 advisors, about 720 across our system. So of those of the nine academic institutions in our system, we have participants from eight of the institutions. As Angie said, in year one, we provided the modules and we gave advising leaders the discretion to launch them with their advising population during the optimal time that worked for them. So it's not surprising that we don't have 100% of our institutions just yet, and they do have a year to complete it. But I did want to point out that one of the goals of this was to make sure that advisors walked away with something and we developed a micro credential. So when people complete our our modules, they have a digital badge that is run in a third party that people can refer back to the skills they've learned. They can put it on their resume or LinkedIn profile. And so far, we've issued 92 micro credentials, which we're really proud of. I think that some of my colleagues mentioned the advising rubric survey. This is a survey that we launched in 2024 and we've made an annual survey. So a few I do want to say that the advising rubric is grounded in nakatas core principles. It's also grounded in the cast standards. And many thanks to our colleagues Heather Smith and Cassandra Alvarado for spearheading that work. But I want to say that for our annual survey, in year 120, 24 we had 269 respondents, which is 37% of our advisor population system wide. That increased in 2025 to 294 respondents, or 40% of our advisor population. And when we look at the survey results, what we're seeing is that 60% of our advisors report that advising is required for all or most students at their institution. Also, 84% of advisors are telling us that students have an assigned advisor. Additionally, 90% of advisors are telling us that they customize advising to meet students where they are. And I'd like to point out just a few other statistics. So 81% of advisors tell us that they do complete comprehensive training that is grounded in standards like student development theory. That's compared to 76% from 2024 so we're up five percentage points. So it's good to see that incremental but positive progress, and it's probably attributed a lot to the rollout of these modules. We've piloted with academic advisors, we've talked to their managers. So we're really doing, I think, a good job of socializing the training that we're we're making available. Conversely, in 2024, 24% of advisors told us that training is largely non standard or not available to all advisors at their institution. But as of last year, that number was down by five percentage points. So only 19% of advisors are telling us that now and finally, 82% advisors tell us that they have advisor they have opportunities to participate in formal professional development annually, and are encouraged to do so, which is up from 77% the year before. So we're seeing some good trends where it's a lot of work, but we are seeing progress.

Matt Markin  
Well, that's. That's really, really amazing to hear. And I would imagine too, there's maybe some, maybe some surprises from maybe the feedback that you're getting. Heather, I want to ask you this like, you know, there's the pilot launch, there's the September 2025, launch. I mean, since the launch, and hearing about all this feedback from advisors, has that has anything surprised you, has anything affirmed, anything that was in that feedback,

Heather Smith  
I think I'll talk about affirmed first, because we kept hearing from our advisors that they wanted training and they wanted professional development. And as Rebecca mentioned, we can, we can't scale an in person for 700 and some advisors across the system, but they kept advisors kept asking for it and asking for it. So I feel very affirmed that we launched this and so many institutions and advisors have already enrolled, and many of them have already completed the micro badge, the credential for the the online modules. And that's important. I think surprise. You know, advisors always talk about, I mean, we always know there's never a good time for anything in the world of advising. I mean, you move from one thing to the next to the next, and it's, it's non stop. And I think that what has surprised me is initially working with advisors through the rubric development, and then through listening to some of their feedback. Through this there was initially the war fatigue done, you know, a variety of things. We're burnout on all of these. I mean, every anybody who's in advising knows that it's always on campus. If something needs to get done and nobody knows who to hand it to, it's like, well, the advisors could do this. Can the advisors do that? The advisors surely can give us this. And so initially we heard from advisors, how are we going to have time to do this? Are our supervisors going to give us time to do this? Will we be able to make time? And that has surprised me, that people have been on it. People have been have made time to do it. Supervisors have given their advising communities and staffs time to do it. And that's been good, and it's been important for us to take that feedback. So for instance, for the advising leadership, I think what has been affirming for me is we gave everybody the opportunity to launch this this year according to their own calendar and workload and so forth, and to pivot when necessary. And so out of the nine institutions, my institution is the one that has not yet enrolled, and that is due to the fact that we have 14 vacancies in the fall, and expectantly across our seven colleges. And the advising leaders here said, Hey, we can't do this in the fall. Please, please, can we? We got to hire advisors and then, and so we shifted the launch for us for the professional development to this spring, because we had to cover 14 vacancy. So all of that has been good. It's a lot of affirmation and a lot of surprises for how much space our advisors will make in their schedules to further develop themselves for things like this. It's been good.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, I was, I happened to live with an advisor, and I was talking with her last night about the black box of advising. It's like, I'm sure if we put something in there, something will come out of it. And it's understanding that black box is, I don't know, maybe where my brain is going next, coming back to Weston, and as we start sort of moving into these sort of perspectives on your experience as individuals, institutions and as a system. Wesson, what advice would you give to other systems or multi campus institutions who are thinking about doing this sort of thing, trying to lead a transformation and advising at scale? What would you recommend?

Weston Rose  
I think that the most important takeaway that we learned from this project was that developing e learning modules for academic advisors professional development is customizable and scalable for your institution or your university system. In terms of advice that I would give, I would say, assemble the right team you likely need advising managers to serve as subject matter experts. But also an instructional designer is really critical to help shape the learning modules from the beginning, help to write those learning objectives. And also for us, we found a project manager, especially in a system level, project was very critical, because you need someone to handle all of the administrative work schedule meetings make sure that we're meeting those milestones. Another thing that really worked for our team was having two co leads for the project. So we had someone at the system, myself, as well as Angie, who's from UT San Antonio, and that was just really helpful, because if one of us, you know, was really busy, the other person could pick up the slack. And it really kept the momentum of the project going forward. Another piece of advice I would give in terms of developing content or curriculum would be to. Identify what are advising community best practices versus what is a specific institutional policy? And this is where Nakata, pillars of academic advising, and its Clearinghouse with helpful articles, became so beneficial to us in terms of contact, I would also say, adhere to the Goldilocks principle so you don't want too much content or too little, and for us, it was important to make sure that our content was engaging. So we tried to avoid text heavy sections in favor of videos and interactive elements like flip cards, matching exercises, accordions, things like that. Another important piece of advice would be to understand the commitment this project requires and to establish a realistic timeline. We thought we would need a year for the project, but actually we needed a year and a half. And while this project was so much fun to work on, and I loved every minute of it, it was very hard work, and our working group was made up of very busy people. They're vital on their campuses, and they're often pulled away for another important meeting. So it's very important to just realize that the work will probably take longer than you may originally think. This next piece of advice is maybe not revelatory, but I would say design the instruction backwards. We started by thinking about what was the knowledge and the skills that any academic advisor would need, and then we develop the learning outcomes from there, and we work backwards in an iterative way to design the curriculum. My second to last piece of advice would be to develop multiple feedback loops for us when we were developing the curriculum, we might run into questions, or we might have a debate among ourselves, and then we would take it back to our academic advising Leadership Council to clarify certain questions that we ran into. Another way that we developed a feedback loop was by doing a 50 person pilot with academic advisors across our institutions to get their input on the modules, the prototype that we had created, and we also have another way for them to provide feedback. Whenever someone takes one of our modules, there's a survey at the end of it. Now that we've launched the modules, that they can give us feedback there too. And my final piece of advice is to expect the unexpected. From the beginning, we always wanted to make sure that academic advisors who completed these e learning modules would receive a micro credential. But right before we were going to launch the program, we learned that from UT San Antonio that the LMS Canvas might not be able to provide Canvas credentials, which is how we would provide those micro credentials. It turned out that that might not be the case, so we were able to launch in September 2025, but then later in December, just last month, we did learn that Canvas is discontinuing its Canvas credentials. So now our academic advisors, who have completed the modules after January 1 are in this limbo period where they're they've completed the module. And until UT San Antonio identifies a new vendor for micro credentials, they won't be able to receive those but once UT San Antonio's Task Force decides on that vendor, we will be able to back issue it. So, you know, just remember that when you're working on this project, anything can happen, expect the unexpected. And I think that's a really helpful piece of advice to anyone going forward. 

Matt Markin  
Yeah, hard to predict the future, but this kind of goes into a question I have for Rebecca, or maybe your thoughts on and your vision, if you had a crystal ball from a system wide level with the advising work at UT, you know, what's next? You know, do you see the fundamentals of excellence evolving? Does this help with laying the groundwork for future initiatives?

Rebecca Karoff  
Absolutely, the crystal ball. I will look into the crystal ball, meaning I will look to all my institutional people here in this room and in our on our advising Leadership Council, because that's where, you know, we don't have, we don't have students that system, but we get to, again, work with the all these leaders across the system and advising in other areas as well to help guide us, but I think for in terms of the fund, where the fundamentals of excellence modules and advising training will go, one thing you know this, in this launch here, we were very clear that we wanted to try to have, as Weston mentioned, 720 advisors. Take this at all our institutions, even if they've been, you know, even if they're seasoned advisors have been in the profession for a while. Moving forward, we expect that new new advisors will take it and then we'll open it up if others want to repeat the course or feel like they need some additional development or training in particular module topics. So we don't expect to so so we're trying to achieve scale. But we know that that those numbers should go down each year, and this course was always designed to supplement what the very campus specific training that all advisors of course receive. So we have to be mindful always of like, what are if you step back and think, what's that sort of system wide culture of advising excellence and shared responsibility that these individual modules that are very focused on the advising profession and portfolios of, you know, the work that advisors do. How might that evolve some future, you know, we can imagine perhaps, well, I don't know. I don't know if Angie and Heather and Weston would say they could imagine, but I can imagine adding some additional modules, perhaps more specific, kind of modules focused on career advising, focused on AI and advising, something that Weston has been interested in, focused on something like transfer advising, because Ryan knows this, the state of Texas has a lot of transfer challenges with its seven university systems, 50 independent community college districts, etc, and we noticed that the advisors who are helping transfer students have those more seamless pathways into and through institutions have some particular set of challenges. So we can imagine additional modules, but it but doing that will be complex. You know, we're going to need who's developing those modules. We want the advising leaders that have been at the table west as Weston mentioned the institutional leaders helping develop the content of the curriculum. We want the instructional design support that Maya at UT San Antonio has provided. And Weston referenced this unit, this division at UT San Antonio, called Academic Innovation. They've had in addition to sort of instructional design, digital learning, and all that expertise. They also have these technology, you know, platforms that they've been able to make it available to us, and we hope, and that's been through a partnership, and we've been able to, you know, be able to pay city San Antonio, which we absolutely need to do for what has been a whole lot of work. We hope we can continue that kind of partnership, but it speaks to what we might be able to do in the future in other ways, with this course, it's possible that we've talked about, I don't know if it's going to it'll have some delivery, delivery complications, but imagine, we've heard from other systems, other advisors across the state. Could our advisors take this kind of course? Now ours is is keyed, as you've heard, to our advising excellence rubric and to a UT System culture, but there's certainly some, you know, given that it's grounded in the work of Nakata and cast standards, of course there would be, I think, really good content and information for any advisor anywhere. So that's something we could think about. We've been asked about that. We also have health institutions in our system, in addition to the nine academic university universities, university we've mentioned. You know that's they have fewer students. As a rule, the majority of undergraduates are at the academic institutions and even the majority of graduate students. But we might consider might consider some work and support for advisors at health institutions, if that would be meaningful to them again at the system level, we will listen and hear the other thing I'll say is that because we've done this partnership, this kind of creation of an entire course with our institutions based on institutional expertise and and leadership and the advising community and profession. We know there are other areas that are interested in developing online modules and getting credentials. One of the areas is developmental education and CO requisite education. That's another initiative that some of us are involved in and led by another one of my colleagues here at system. That's work we are considering right now. I think there's some some partners involved in thinking about what kind of professional development do we need to do for instructors, faculty and others who are teaching developmental education and CO requisite teachings. Because that is an area across the country, but certainly in Texas, we have a lot of students who are coming in who are not, I don't love the term, but not, you know, college ready in terms of math and writing and reading. So we know that that's an area. So this, this whole project, has has real replicability in other areas and other dimensions of student success. So that's the kind of thing we do. The other thing, I will just say, this emphasis on advising excellence and elevating the profession has really fed into some of the other student success work that that I've been a part of. We have some we have a major grant funded project. We're actually just launching phase two with additional grant support around curricular redesign, and we've we've funded, over the last four years, 22 projects at our institutions focused on very data informed curricular redesign with teams and cohorts those projects, whether you're doing a sort of gateway course redesign or entire major redesign, the role of advisors in those projects. Has been critical, and projects where you're not some of those projects where they're not talking to their advisors, it's sort of like, Hello people, you're missing this core group of insight and expertise that are going to help you understand how your students are moving through your your curriculum, your major, your gateway courses, or in some cases, not moving through. And that's what we're trying to interrupt, the students who stop out the students who are not successful. And that's on us, and we're trying to figure out in other ways. So so this whole project, I think, has just really served its original purpose, which is to elevate the advising profession and ensure that every student is it receives effective advising so that they can be successful in college and beyond. So there's a lot of ideas we have. You know, we sometimes our eyes are bigger than our stomachs or whatever the expression is, so we won't be able to do all of this. And one thing I will just add at the system level, I'm very mindful of the inadvertent pressure and demands we put on institutional leaders like Heather and like Angie to sort of say, Hey, want to be a part of this next incredible initiative. And this isn't the only initiative that these people are involved with. So we're very mindful of their capacity, their bandwidth, and just want to do everything we can to at the system level to make sure we're being responsive to institutions, their students, and how we support the people

Ryan Scheckel  
I love. I love that the idea of trying to balance the bold courage of these new initiatives and opportunities to innovate with the consideration for those involved. But I also love that you know, advising has taken to the forefront in some ways, and may have set a standard for what might be thought of as other disciplines at institutions, to say we, we, maybe we could do something like that too. You know, Angie, I want to come back to you. You mentioned the practitioner perspective and and I was being centered there. And I'm just kind of curious, what has this project changed about how you personally think about advising and leadership and and collaboration.

Angie Barrera  
The project has reaffirmed my belief in advising, the importance of advising. I think now we have so much more data that shows the impact that academic advising has on our students, but with this project, what this reaffirms is that we need to continue to invest in our advisors. I've always said a well trained advisor is a better advisor for a student, an advisor who feels like we've invested in them and their education, then brings that right to the students that they're serving. So I think this project just reaffirms All That Was it, was it easy? Absolutely not. Was it worth all the work? Absolutely and we're going to continue the work. You know, whatever extra projects come off of this, even though we are busy people, as we've all said that, you know, we're all steered with our commitment and our passion to students. I think some of the other pieces that you know, as we think about in our you know what our leadership is. You know, we continue to have to tell the story. So the things that we're learning, the data that we have, it's pivotal that we bring that information back to our leadership. You know, we definitely have had support from the UT System and ensuring that, you know, we're moving these projects forward, but it's just as important for our institutions to understand, to recognize and to have that information, because we know we continue to evolve, we continue to grow. And, you know, the planting of the seeds. I love the planting of the seeds. I want a mid Management module. I want a module to teach advisors how to, you know, to put proposals together. You know, those are all pivotal pieces that I used to have in one of my programs. And you know, if you can teach your team to do this, then, you know, I always say, I'm giving you the seed. Now you've got to see the next, the next generation, so we'll continue doing that with our capabilities. But we learned so much. We also, I feel like this group who came together to work on these modules. I feel like, you know, the collaboration. I feel I can pick up the phone and call any of my colleagues the weather. It's for something, you know, for my institution, or for me personally, we have done a lot of thinking together, a lot of, you know, eating together, but that that has just made us better individuals. We've become better listeners at the same time with listening to unique situations of institutions where, again, we said we're different in sizes, but that doesn't mean that we don't have things. We can share or help. You know, someone think outside of the box just because they're they're a little stuck, so that's what we're here for now. And we have a great network of individuals, and I look forward to the work that we'll continue to bring.

Matt Markin  
And I'm sure you have many advisors that are like, wow, the system actually cares about us and our development and Heather, let me ask you a crystal ball question. Let's say it's three years from now. Where do you hoping we're talking about regarding the impact that you all are doing with your work?

Heather Smith  
Three years from now? I'm hoping we're talking about two key elements of the 5e framework, elevate we set out, both on my campus and on other campuses and system wide a decade ago to elevate the profession of advising, so that advisors would have the respect on their campuses and in the system that the job I think deserves, to enhance and elevate their career pathways and To really give them the opportunity to understand their contribution to student success and what an important piece of student success advising is so Elevate, definitely, that our advisors would feel like their career their career pathways and their positions have been elevated. And then the other piece is enhancing the the student experience. So enhancing, you know, many advising interactions are still very transactional, and the goal is that we develop advisors who have the space then to develop relationships and rapport with students, to help guide them through decision making and and really improve the interactions between students and their advisors. And so those are the things that in three years, if we've had any impact, I hope that's what they are fantastic.

Matt Markin  
And to wrap up, I have a question for each of you. You know, higher ed can be a stressful time at many times during the year, overlapping priorities, a lot of roles and responsibilities. What do each of you do for your wellness?

Weston Rose  
Well, I'll jump in here. One thing that I love to do, I would say two things. One thing I love to do is listen to podcasts. That's actually how I came across Adventures in Advising, and I've really enjoyed listening to you guys. I also would say that another way that I sort of de stress and focus on my wellness is by playing pickleball. It's a new passion of mine for the past two years. 

Heather Smith  
I'll jump in and say, I am I struggle. I have a big problem. Somebody just told me I needed to learn about work, life balance. But I love to read. I still love to read good old fashioned books, so I read a lot. And I mean, I love to travel, and so I always am looking for what's the next thing, even though I don't always give myself the space. But I love to read, and I love to spin. Spin class.

Angie Barrera  
Go ahead. Angie, go ahead. I would say, right now I've my commitment is to try to put myself first. So I, you know, like I've had to talk to my family about, like, when I come home and I don't say anything, I may go to my room. It's just a little bit of me time that decompression time listening to music really helps me relax in different types, like, if I need motivation, or if I need I need to wind down, music has been my focus. And then one of my other goals is just getting out, like, just outside, just, you know, if it's walking around or just taking the dog for a walk, just just a little bit more focus on me. I too, am guilty of the work life balance, but definitely just that focus on understanding that we have to prioritize ourselves in order for us to continue to give.

Rebecca Karoff  
I'll add to some of that, I find there's so much noise out there, and actually it's very hard to tune the news out right now. So and So I work hard on that. I don't have the best work life balance for lots of reasons, but I do always prioritize reading like Heather, and I sometimes have a little embarrassed, but no, I just have to claim it. I despite having a PhD in comparative literature and writing a dissertation on Proust. You know, decades ago, I now spend an inordinate amount of time reading romances, and it's like I can gobble them up. I read fast. I love them. I also read very good literature, too. That's out there new fiction, mostly fiction, but I just sort of love the romances because they are formulaic. They have all the same tropes, and I love that, and they have happy endings. And right now I need Happy Endings so, so that's, that's how I spend my free time. And it's actually, it's like, I think it's very therapeutic.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, and I think we've ended on a happy note with this podcast episode. So thank you all for sharing about that as well. Is all the great work that you are doing so Rebecca, Angie, Heather Wesson, thank you for joining us today on the podcast.