IT Staff Convention 2006: Student Support Challenges

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Student Support Challenges

Facilitator: Anna Kent, Wharton

Notes: Edda Katz, ISC Communications Group

Supporting students brings with it a unique set of challenges. IT staff must strike a balance of providing assistance to make sure that students' systems are ready to use all of Penn's resources in a secure way, while respecting the fact that a student's computer is not owned by the university. This and other issues raise interesting customer service concerns within the context of IT. This discussion will center on the expectations of our student users, and how we can best meet and manage those expectations while giving them the help that they need. Moderated by Anna Kent, Wharton

Attendees

Included folks from Wharton, SEAS, ISC AIT-Data Administration, Vet, ISC TSS, College House Computing, CCEB (Med School), Newman House, and Academic Support Programs.

Discussion

Discussion developed and expanded around a topic raised by Vet School staff: Vet School for the first time is asking all students to have laptops. They will do "best effort" support and refer other questions to CRC, which is responsible for supporting off-campus students. Their environment will be largely wireless. Two problems were discussed – how to define best effort and how to communicate this support model to students clearly and without making them feel they are not getting enough from the School in return for their technology fee. The IT director will probably send a letter to the students, there may be brochures or other literature, and there will be info on the web.

The discussion included the following:

• Important not to send mixed signals re how to get support.
• It's useful to force students to a web site where they need to acknowledge/accept policies and other info (Wharton does this successfully when students set up their Wharton accounts/passwords).

Provide a checklist of what is required of students (which helps reduce support), e.g.,

• Register Mac address
• Require secure passwords on machines
• Required antivirus updates and patches

Law and School of Design are rigorous about checking that student machines are secured – talk to them re their processes.

ISC TSS will do machine certification and have extended hours during Fall Crush.

ISC-TSS has "Quick Check" service for laptops – of variable lengths – 10 minutes to 1/2 hour depending on the problem. If they can’t fix a machine in the available time, it is checked into a queue for further attention. Turnaround time varies from several days to several weeks. The most common problem is wireless connectivity. They really like Thinkpads because they can run a quick restore immediately if the owner doesn’t care about the data.

For off-campus students, ISC supports basic computer/network functionality. Students should talk to:

• ISC for general computing needs
• School for School-specific stuff

On-campus students can get help from their ITAs.

Wharton has excellent info for students on their student portal, SPIKE. See http://spike.wharton.upenn.edu and click the Computing tab.

How Wharton handles student computing support:

• Wharton tries to manage expectations up front.
• Students can sign up for a one-hour laptop appointment but most walk in.
• Walk-ins are told about services and reminded re backup and virus protection and given some amount of service immediately, depending on how busy the staff is. If staff is too busy, they are pointed to the web.
• Web site is designed for self-help and kept as up to date as possible with current info and issues.
• Students who make appointments online have to agree with some policies beforehand.

Suggestions:

• Important to communicate with students early, before they get to campus, to manage expectations – the problem always is the volume of info students get and the number of different web sites they need to visit; just-in-time and on-demand communications are most effective.
• Orientations are useful, but the problem, as with communications, is that there's a huge volume of info to be delivered and IT topics are a tiny slice of the whole.
• CDs don't work well for disseminating info.
• Blogs are used effectively in the Admissions Office – engagement with incoming students begins in March or April.
• Parents are also in the communications equation.
• College Houses used students to communicate effectively with other students.
• Med School training has developed some online videos that have been very effective. See http://www.med.upenn.edu/somtrain/knowledgelink/
• Wharton has used Captivate software from Adobe to create learning aids for configuring email and other software.

Laptops - Dell has been working to close the gap between its models and Thinkpads, but several people felt Thinkpads are still better. Currently only 50% of students have supported models which raises support issues. It's important to define up front which models receive full support from a given support organization.

There's an issue re how to support students who drop in at campus locations and have a problem with a wireless or plug-in hard-wired port. Implementing ISC's wireless service with PennKey authentication makes support easier in this situation. Don’t need to register Mac addresses and problems can be sent to ISC because if someone can't access ISC's wireless from a given location, it's unlikely that the issue is local. Wharton did this.

Security Issues:

• CCEB has a VPN – users authenticate and then use SSL.
• College Houses and Law School will be introducing "scan and block" technology to check for compromised computers when students try to log on to the network.
• College Houses had great success with NetReg – they were able to ID problems instantly and reformat problem machines.
• Remind students that security is their responsibility.

Moderator's Summary:

• ISC TSS & CRC are there to help all support providers
• Networking is a valuable means for support providers to learn from one another
• It's important to manage expectations
• Communicate early and often.