It will also be accesible in the Advice Centre in the Student Services at the University of Liverpool. WISH informs the user about what to expect from helping agencies, employing text, cartoons and photographs. The numbers of students studying in higher education are increasing, along with the staff employed to teach and support them.
Human resources are costly and difficult to replace by technological innovations.
However, WISH is an application of technology which enhances, integrates and supports services which already exist and may be under pressure, such as personal tutoring. Problems are presented in a low key, normalising style. The user chooses which aspect of a problem to follow up and can either link to strategies for self-help where appropriate or to details about how to get help and what to expect. Anxiety is managed and contained rather than opened up for exploration as would occur in counselling. The WISH team is now exploring ways of turning the prototype into a marketable system customised to the needs of other institutions, as well as establishing it fully in the University of Sheffield.