This project will design and test an online community of practice for student advising based on the open source business model and proposed principles of participation from social psychology. The resulting digital artifact will provide a sustainable platform for student advising and will serve as a test-bed to study human behavior in socio-technical systems and evaluate advising. The context for this exploratory research and practice will be the freshmen engineering program at Virginia Tech. The faculty in the Engineering Education department is responsible for advising all incoming (approximately 1400) freshmen students and each faculty advises about 100 students, in addition to teaching, research, and service responsibilities. This system will benefit the faculty by making advising easier and more efficient and will provide students with easy access to critical advising information. This research will produce metrics for evaluation of advising, a wiki-based sustainable platform for advising, and theoretical understanding of relationships between human behavior and socio-technical systems. The results are an important step towards understanding and developing a community of practice that bridges physical and electronic worlds and brings together diverse groups of students. Successful guidelines will be shared and disseminated to other institutions.
Increasing the number of engineering graduates is important to economic competitiveness, and research has shown that lack of quality advising is often a factor when students leave engineering programs. However, research, teaching and service compete for faculty time and there is a fundamental misalignment between the incentives for tenure and advising and mentoring of students. The project will create a dynamic repository with community features and facilitate interpersonal interaction. The sustainability of this platform is assured through incentives for constant participation of faculty and advising staff by reducing their time commitment and redundancy of effort, and by introducing metrics to measure their contribution. This project will serve as a model for other systems that can support engineering students for the duration of their undergraduate education.
