Making support accessible is an important part of providing effective user support. EesySoft makes this easy by facilitating just-in-time support from within the digital learning environment.
How to Provide Accessible Support to Faculty
When faculty go through the process of adopting new technology into their teaching practices, help desks play an important role in the successful utilisation of each new tool. But while many institutions have various procedures in place to support faculty in their use of new technology, these support channels are often underutilised. If institutions want to effectively support their faculty’s technology use, they must go past simply implementing support procedures and must understand the barriers that prevent faculty members from seeking support - barriers such as the accessibility of support channels. By addressing these barriers, institutions can realise the full value of their investment in learning technology. The first stage in increasing the utilisation of technical support requires institutions to make support channels more visible to users.
Visibility of support
A primary barrier preventing faculty from seeking support is the visibility and accessibility of technical support resources. When a technical issue occurs, support documentation must be clearly defined and easy to access if they are to be utilised. If this documentation is not easily accessible and ordered, users will look for more convenient ways to find technical support or stop using the tool that is creating the issue. The same is true for help desks and in-person support.
Many faculty members are not aware of the support tools that they can access when a support issue occurs.
Research on faculty adoption of e-learning technology found a divergence between the support tools that were provided by institutions and the perceived level of support that faculty members noted during interviews. This meant that many faculty members were not aware of the support tools that they could access when a support issue occurred. The result was underutilised support channels and an under-supported faculty. By clearly defining support channels to faculty and making technical support more accessible, institutions can more effectively support faculty in their technology use.
How to make support more accessible?
With EesySoft’s EesySupport Center, faculty can access all their support resources in a single place. The 24/7 contextual support tab will provide users with an automatically filtered library of support materials. The dynamic support escalation feature allows faculty to escalate a support request within the LMS and be instantly connected to the relevant technical support representative without the hassle of looking for the correct email or phone number.
By moving support articles from an external website into EesySoft’s Support Center, John Williams, Learning Technology Manager at Regent University made support articles available to LMS users within Blackboard at the click of a button. As a result, Regent University was able to decrease the call volume to their help-desk, deflecting help-desk calls by enabling users to troubleshoot their own support requests.
"Currently with our in-house faculty support, all roads pretty much lead back to EesySoft... Self help is really a part of our culture now" - John Williams
Read the full Regent University case study here
Proactive support with EesyMessages
EesyMessages make it easy to communicate with faculty within the LMS; showing faculty members the support channels that are available to them is as easy as placing a single message within the LMS.
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