Course advising is the fulcrum of an academic staff roles in a university system towards ensuring quality production of human capital needed for development. The study therefore investigated the level of effectiveness of course advisers and their challenges in public universities in Edo State. The descriptive survey of the ex-post facto design was adopted for the study. Course advisers in University of Benin, Benin City and Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma during the 2018/2019 academic session constituted the study population. Purposive sampling technique was used to select 40 course advisers each from the two institutions across ten uniform departments from the two universities. 1600 students who served as respondents to the instruments were also purposively sampled. 80 students each were sampled from the study population from the 10 common departments in the two institutions. Two sets of researcher’s design questionnaire which were validated by senior academics and reliability of the instruments ascertained were used to collect data for the study. Descriptive and inferential statistics such as mean, standard deviation, t-test and multiple regression analysis were used to analyse the data collected. The results of the analysis revealed that course advisers in the public universities in Edo State were generally ineffective. It was also found that there was no significant difference in the effectiveness of course advisers based on experience and gender. The study equally found that course advisers’ effectiveness was hampered by many challenges. To improve on the effectiveness of course advisers, some managerial strategies were recommended. Among which was that regular workshops, seminars and trainings should be organized for course advisers to improve on their capacity. It was also recommended that they should be equipped with computers and internet facilities to boost their effectiveness and efficiency. Another recommendation was that online course advising should be introduced to ease the problem of students’ pressure.
Keywords: Edo state, Effectiveness, Public Universities, course advisership, management strategies
