Managing Matrixed, Dispersed Advisors in Virtual Universities

There is a lack of research about how to manage the advising role in purely virtual universities. This paper highlights the need for virtual universities to coordinate a large, distributed teaching staff through virtual workgroups. In the particular case of academic advising, these groups may function in a virtual, matrix structure –as occurs in the Open University of Catalonia-, thus generating specific coordination challenges. The paper elaborates an Input-Process-Output model that can be used as a guide for researching the effectiveness of matrixed, dispersed advisors.