Student Counselling Services Websites

This article is a personal view of the virtues of a student counselling service website, written from the perspective of someone who has been in the enviable position (I jest) of having to construct a website for a student counselling service of a large university. I will concentrate on the purposes behind establishing an Internet presence for a counseling office.

I work for the Student Counselling Service of Cardiff University. Cardiff is one of Britain's major civic universities. In the most recent independent assessment of the quality of research in universities, Cardiff was ranked 15th out of more than 100 British universities.

Cardiff has 23 departments and schools, incorporating a wide range of subject areas: Business Studies and Law; Engineering and Environmental Design; Health and Life Sciences; Humanities and Social Studies and Physical Sciences. There are more than 15 000 undergraduate and postgraduate students drawn from throughout Wales, the rest of the UK and from overseas. The whole University has presence of the Net and it was not expected that the Student Counselling Service (SCS from hereon in) should be an exception

The significant tasks that faced me in composing our website were easy to define but more difficult to address. The first was, why have a presence on the Internet at all? The second was (assuming it is agreed that a web page should be constructed), who are the audiences for this information? The third question was, how are those audiences going to benefit from the information posted, and what are the benefits and possible pitfalls of having information on public display?

The first question was, for me, an easy one to deal with. If an institution establishes a web presence, it follows that all the constituent departments or divisions of that institution must follow suit. One would not wish for an individual or a group to be conspicuous by their absence. However, it is possible to establish a presence in a fairly passive, or minimalist, sense. For example, the SCS could appear on the University site as a single page, maybe with the phone number, an email address and opening times. This would be simple, quick, easy and informative, and, as a task for me, eminently time-efficient. So, I felt obligated to make the SCS appear on the Web in some form, in order to conform to Cardiff University's policies. This does not help you, gentle reader, if you have the choice. However, it may help you to decide to write your web pages if you think further, as I had to do, about the potential audiences and the ways they might benefit from your efforts.

The main audience that I composed the SCS site for was the students at Cardiff University. However, students - even in the UK - are not the homogeneous population of popular belief. Students come in a wide range of ages, backgrounds, ethnic origins and religious and cultural beliefs.

This brings up the very first issue to be considered, when writing a text. Serious consideration has to be given to the style, the tone of the text. Because of the heterogeneity of the student population, in writing for it the author should keep in mind what the whole range of readers may, and may not, understand. I found that even simple statements might be confusing to an overseas student who is not yet very proficient in English. However, avoiding the rock of complexity risks the author fetching up against the hard place of condescension. Speaking entirely for myself, I know that, as a therapist, I can hear myself patronise a student in a counselling session. However, I can stop myself, apologise to the student and start again. In a written text, there is no similar chance afforded to someone who has turned off his or her readers. I can offer no one-size-fits-all solutions here, except to say that it may be useful to keep in mind the tension between talking-down-to simplicity as opposed to impenetrable sophistication.

However, with the Web there is a third way. That is, one can write at more than one level, simultaneously. Using hypertext, and the phrase, "to find out more" (or its equivalent) one can place a general piece of information in the forefront, while giving the more sophisticated reader the chance to jump to some writing that is appropriate to their level of understanding. This includes links to other, specialist sites, as well as links within one's own site.

A related issue is something brought to my attention by a student I was seeing for counselling. When I mentioned the SCS website as a source for some information he might find helpful, he remarked that he was reluctant to use our website. This was because he only had access to computers in public places, and he did not feel comfortable looking at material that passers-by could see him studying. He did not like the idea that, sitting in the library, his friends and colleagues might notice that he was reading about, say, suicide or self-harm. This made me realise that the convention for producing sites with a high impact is not necessarily appropriate for counselling pages. Here the Web has a huge advantage over other information-disseminating media.

The third question is how are those audiences going to benefit from the information posted, and what are the benefits and possible pitfalls of having information on public display? It is important to avoid self-indulgence or narcissism. What do we have to offer that is more meaningful than self-aggrandising home pages? To answer that question I shall use the Cardiff University Student Counselling Service Website as an example.

One feature of a counselling service website that may be very useful, is the possibility of dispelling myths. In the UK at least, most students have not experienced counselling prior to coming to university. So, they may come to counselling burdened with all kinds of misconceptions about what is on offer. By use of a common Web convention - the FAQs (frequently asked questions) - many of the general and specific misunderstandings may be addressed. In no other way can the curious and concerned get the kind of reassurance that can be placed on the Web. Hyperlink jumps allow a worried or puzzled student to focus on their specific concern, without any distraction from extraneous material.

These arguments apply equally to the self-help material. By using links, the level of detail can be built progressively. One huge flaw in printed self-help information is that it cannot be all things to all people. A comprehensive leaflet on self-harm may contain information on cosmetic surgery options that a self-harmer might be very grateful to have. However, that same information might be profoundly distressing to a person whose self-harm is not at that level. The progressive display of material allows every reader access to information pitched to their specific and individual requirements.

Inserting links into your Web Pages saves you such a lot of time and energy. It also avoids any risk of breaching copyright. Most important it puts your readers in contact with material from the source. For example, having been asked by students for information about clinical issues that were outside my professional competence to give, I put a link from our Website to the NHS Direct Website. Here there is a lot of information on dozens of clinical conditions. Much of this material is available in Urdu, Gujarati and other languages. Best of all, a lot of explanations are in audio form, recordings that were made for the NHS helpline. Another link that I put in was to the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Here there are a series of electronic leaflets on common psychiatric conditions. They are of a quality, and carry an authority, I could not possibly afford, or hope to imitate. This is the kind of material that I can set in front of interested clients that I could not possibly do any other way.

There are two issues that arise from the self-help material on the Web. It is not any more than information. It is not, for example, electronic counselling. Computer programmes that respond in pseudo-counsellor fashion do exist; a famous example is Eliza.

The other issue is that some counsellors have expressed concerns that users of information can be detected and targeted in some way. Innocent but irritating is the way that an electronic "enquiry" sometimes leads to inclusion on a mailing list, and endless electronic junk mail, thereafter. More sinister is the conspiracy theory that profiles of Internet surfers can be built up, using websites visited as data. Naturally, since the technology exists, there may be the suspicion that it is being used in these ways for the users of Student Counselling Services websites. The use of hidden cameras and tape recorders to record clandestinely therapy sessions is a parallel situation. Here, too, it is possible to worry about misuse, breaches of confidentiality and respect. However, the Cardiff SCS website is not set up to spy on its users. It does contain a couple of simple counters, to collect data on hit rates, but that is all.

Another use of our website is to publish all the information that is very rarely required, or looked at, but to the few who need it, is essential. A disclaimer, for example, or the annual report, or the mission statement may not be indispensable reading for all, but can be placed on the website in such a way that they can be viewed by those who are interested.

This, too is something that a leaflet just could not do.

There is a second population of potential users of student counselling websites, namely the counsellors. By means of information generated locally or by means of links to other sites, the SCS website was also designed as a resource for counsellors. Obviously, unless there is a password-protected to an area for the use of counsellors only, care must be taken not to place anything on the counsellors' pages that could cause embarrassment or distress to students. I have dealt with this by informing SCS staff that a significant resource for them are the same self-help links posted for the use of students. The link to the Royal College of Psychiatry, is one such example. Another example is the link to the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, the professional body of many counsellors. We have also used the SCS site to advertise traineeships in the SCS, thus giving the responsibility for acquiring the information to the candidate.

When a Student Counselling Service uses the Internet to provide information for their customers and staff, as well as the significant benefits there are a few potential pitfalls. However, if you are aware of the issues, the risks are reduced. I hope that this exploration of the subject will convince you that a student counselling services website can be a valuable resource.

For permission to use information from the Cardiff University Web site, contact Hanno Koppel.