The beginning of a new semester is often a time of both excitement and anxiety for both students and faculty members. Here are three ways you can help your end users and ensure a smooth transition into the new term!
1. Reduce FAQs and frustration
One of the most common questions at the start of the semester centers around Course Availability.Thus, consider placing proactive messages, like a systray or hint, on the 
home page of your LMS that tell your instructors how to make their courses available and that instruct students what to do if they do not see their course(s) listed. It’s also good to include who they should contact if they still have questions. Consider directing users to the Support Center contact options if appropriate.
2. Highlight the new stuff
Are there new features or functionality within your LMS? Has there been an upgrade or is there expected downtime?
Placing hints that identify these new features can be helpful as well as adding help articles to your Support Center that explain the features in more detail.
A popup can be a good way to alert users to scheduled downtime but be careful of using popups too often as they are the most obtrusive messages to end users.
3. Measure impact from the get-go
The beginning of the semester is a great time to start a Campaign to measure the adoption of new or pre-existing tools in your LMS. Now you can add help items and proactive messages to Campaigns to see how they directly impact adoption. Do you have upcoming training sessions with faculty to increase LMS usage? Are you sending out emails to inform users about new features? Use campaigns to track and evaluate how effective your outreach activities (i.e. Campaign events) are on increasing tool adoption.
If you have any questions or would like assistance with any of the above, please contact us at support@eesysoft.com.
Have a great start to the semester!