The State University of New York (SUNY) online learning initiative, Open SUNY, operates a centralized support service desk for nearly 40 different SUNY colleges to assist their students, faculty, and campus staff with learning management system inquiries. This session will focus on the service desk resources and how data collected is used and communicated to various stakeholders.
The State University of New York (SUNY) online learning initiative, Open SUNY, operates a centralized support service desk currently averaging around 25,000 contacts annually for nearly 40 different SUNY colleges. Open SUNY Support Services consists of small Service Desk of 10 or less staff and an Application Services team of four staff to assist SUNY students, faculty, and campus staff with their Blackboard Learning management system issues and requests. This session will focus on the various Service Desk resources we use to help end users and also how data collected is used and communicated to various stakeholders to try to operate effectively.
The Open SUNY Service Desk is unique compared to a campus help desk in that we are a staff of professionals based off campus with a primary focus of supporting specific campus learning management systems for more than twenty years. During that time, we have helped campuses migrate from a home-grown learning management system (LMS) to ANGEL and now to Blackboard with several years of supporting more than one LMS. As an opt-in university wide service, it is important that we provide SUNY campuses with the economies of scale so that their own campus online staff can devote more time focusing on areas that are specifically mission critical to them.
This education session will give a brief history of the Open SUNY Service Desk to frame what we started with to what we are today. As we are not a mandated service, it is important that we focus on several performance metrics to make sure our infrastructure meets the needs of the campuses while maintaining our limited budget. We will ask participants to share what metrics they use and if they are effective in their environment. We will explain what shareholders we provide various data to and how they may utilize it. We will ask participants to provide their experiences in communicating data to specific campus staff and how effective or ineffective that may be. The goal is to create some dialogue on what metrics should be used to measure performance supporting a higher education learning management system. The impact this data has in determining the infrastructure of a support organization and who cares about the metrics.
The Open SUNY Service Desk also provides several self-help resources to our campuses at no extra cost. Although our size does not allow us to be directly available 24 hours 7 days a week, we will share via web links some of the more valuable tools that our staff has created and maintained over time. This includes an online student orientation, knowledge base, and program and course catalog. We will briefly discuss the benefits these tools provide as well as engage the audience with some of the challenges we have run into to help facilitate a short question and answer period at the end of the session.