Online Counselling Support in Australian and New Zealand Universities

The higher education sector is currently undergoing a major shift towards increasing the amount of courses that are taught online, hence there is also a growing need to provide support services for online students. This paper reports on the results of a survey that aimed to gather information on the online presence of counselling services across Australian and New Zealand higher education facilities. It indicates that movement towards offering online counselling support for students is slow, with services and professionals showing some resistance to, and anxiety around, moving into this sphere. Where services have been offered, there is little consistency across the sector. A number of challenges around engagement, marketing, technology and clinician anxiety have hampered successful outcomes. There have been notable exceptions to this, with a few universities trialling different online platforms and engagement strategies with students, with varying levels of success. Overall there appears to be a need for counsellors to be offered training in providing online services to students; not only to increase their confidence in providing these services, but also to help to change attitudes about online mental health services. There is also a need for more research into the efficacy of those models which are operating successfully, in order to encourage change in clinician attitudes, which in turn may lead to further adoption of online services across the sector.