Online and Ready to Help: Synchronous Chatting for Academic Support
Dana Davidson
Daytona State College, Daytona Beach Campus
Summary
Daytona State College’s Academic Support Center, Library, and Writing Center have partnered to offer an innovative and efficient way to interact with students in the college’s online environment. Our online Chats provide students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to engage in live, synchronous communication with the college’s academic support specialists for a variety of needs. The ASC chat gives students the chance to ask questions about tutor and workshop availability. The Library chat allows students, including students on campuses without a physical library, to get full service research assistance. At the Writing Center, chatting provides students with quick writing help and resource referral, as well as another way to schedule face-to-face and virtual appointments with the Writing Center. When offline, the Chat defaults to each department’s Q&A database, so students can be referred to relevant, contextualized resources, all of which are developed and maintained by academic support staff. With built-in analytics and transcripts of each exchange online, data aggregation is another amazing benefit of the Chat. We can keep track of the type of questions student are asking, measure online traffic, and use the information to plan future student engagement. Plus, the chat platform is flexible enough to accommodate various workflows. Finally, because the Chat allows us to have a specialist familiar with campus resources available to help students online, we are able to help students navigate our college’s online environment via referrals to service points on campus.
Why Chat?
Like it or not, this is a texting world. Students today prefer to communicate in text format, and chat is the next best thing. Additionally, research has shown that the chat format has benefits for students. “Chat can create a natural context for learner independence….as a developing variety of interaction, Internet chat has unique linguistic and interactional features that are distinct from either oral or written communication” (Pasfield-Neofitou, 2017).
Growth via Collaboration
Originally, Chat began as a library initiative via the SpringShare LibApps platform. The library administrator offered to assist other departments with initiating a chat feature in their areas. The platform allows the administrator to create and share an embed code with other areas so that they can create a unique widget on their webpage. Since the Writing Center and ASC often collaborate with the Library, these two departments were the first onboard. Surprisingly, a large percentage of the ASC’s chat inquiries were actually questions related to Enrollment, Advising, and Financial Aid. Over the first two weeks the ASC’s Chat went live, they received 57 chats, but only five of these were actually related to ASC services. With this data in hand, the Chair of the ASC was able to persuade Enrollment Services to adopt their own Chat, which has gotten heavy traffic since its creation. In fact, in January 2020, Enrollment Services received 1,347 total chats. Of these, 1,082 were answered and 265 were missed. Such a large number were missed due to staffers being too inundated with chats to answer all of them. [Employees later emailed students to follow up on missed chats].
Logistics
Due to the flexible nature of the Chat, supervisors in individual areas are free to administer their platform in ways that most meet the needs of their areas. Our three areas staff the Chat in the following ways:
Next Steps
Recently DSC was awarded a Title III grant, and part of that will be a total overhaul of our website. The amount of traffic we have received in our various chats has been eye-opening to many stakeholders on campus. Partly for this reason, there is a hope to implement a Chat on the homepage of our website so that students can get immediate answers without having to search individual pages.
Abstract
The purpose of this session is to share Daytona State College’s Academic Support Center, Library, and Writing Center live Chat available via each department’s website. The Chat offers students a mode of communication familiar and comfortable to them, while giving academic support staff another way to engage students and refer them to appropriate, relevant campus resources.
References
Pasfield-Neofitou, S. E. (2007). Intercultural internet chat and language learning: A socio-cultural theory perspective, learning and socio-cultural theory. Exploring Modern Vygotskian Perspectives International Workshop, 1(1). http://ro.uow.edu.au/llrg/vol1/iss1/10