Title: 02.08.007-Technical Support

Policy Number: 02.08.007

Policy Title: Technical Support

Status: Active

Policy:

The institution provides appropriate support for students and faculty in the use of technology first and foremost by attempting to adopt common if not ubiquitous communication channels so that students and faculty who are successful in day-to-day communications in other aspects of their lives do not have to learn a new system in order to be effective and successful in seeking technical assistance in the online learning environment. An onboarding video is produced for most courses, which helps students understand expectations and understand when and how to seek support if they are unable to log in to various learning environments. However, students are encouraged to use the same multi-channel communication methods they are most comfortable with to ask support questions for technical, administrative, billing, post-graduation, and academic needs.

All these communication channels are funneled through three distinct but integrated systems, which help create institutional accountability for quick resolution of support issues and quick identification of system-wide outages or other problems. Support-Desk tickets are created for all support inquiries that are not immediately resolved. The student support “desk” software is integrated with the Zoho CRM to ensure that support requests are prioritized and completed in a timely way.

For more technical issues not able to be resolved through the more common aforementioned methods, the institution also offers audio conference based tutoring sessions that allow for screen sharing, which provides a more in depth approach to identifying and resolving troublesome technical complications.

The institution also takes proactive measures to help identify students that may be experiencing technical difficulties that are either unknown to them or that haven’t been communicated to the institution by the student yet. For example, a Momentum Score is calculated routinely for every student, and this score among other things helps the Teaching Team identify students who have not logged in recently. The Teaching Team uses these metrics to reach out to the students to, among other things, determine if the student is experiencing technical issues. This proactive approach helps the Teaching Team segregate the issues that cause a student to fail to thrive into those that are strictly technical versus those that are related to motivation or other life circumstances.