Community College Articulation Agreement Websites: Students' Suggestions for New Academic Advising Software Features

TL;DR

This study gathers community college transfer students' suggestions for improving the ASSIST website with new features to enhance academic advising and articulation agreement clarity.

Contribution

It identifies specific software feature suggestions from students to improve articulation agreement websites and academic advising tools.

Findings

Students want features to automate advising tasks

Features to clarify articulation agreements are desired

Tools to reduce course planning mistakes and facilitate online advising

Abstract

Articulation agreements provide more transparency about how community college courses will transfer and fulfill university requirements. However, the literature displays conflicting results on whether articulation agreements improve transfer-related outcomes; perhaps one contributor to these conflicting research results is the subpar user experience of articulation agreement reports and the websites that host them. Accordingly, we surveyed and interviewed California community college transfer students to gather their suggestions for new academic-advising-related software features for the ASSIST website. ASSIST is California's official centralized repository of articulation agreement reports between public California community colleges and universities. We analyzed the open-ended survey and interview data using structural coding and thematic analysis. We identified four themes around students' software feature suggestions for ASSIST: (a) features that automate laborious academic advising tasks, (b) features to reduce ambiguity with articulation agreements, (c) features to mitigate mistakes in term-by-term course planning, and (d) features to facilitate online advising from advisors and student peers.