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Tag: Support

Student Sex Work Awareness

Published 2nd July 2021

Sex Work Support Resources for Students
Screenshot of some support resources from the presentation (in text below)

Attended this awareness-raising session from the University’s EDI network on student sex work. The session covered the four main legal models of sex work, and I was surprised to learn that the UK employs the ‘best’ model, full decriminalisation. Alas, we criminalise literally everything around sex work making it all but impossible, and dangerous. Why students engage in sex work, and this one only depressed rather than surprised me, with half the responses being on the theme of avoiding debt, paying student fees, etc. Neoliberalism strikes again! And finally, most usefully, what universities can do to help students involved in sex work, and signposts to further sources of support. I took a screenshot of those, but to make it easier (and accessible), here they are:

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Canvas On-Boarding Webinars

Published 25th April 2017

Participated in a series of webinars delivered over three days which covered everything we needed to know to get started with our shiny new Canvas VLE.

The webinars were divided into three topics, admin, support and fundamentals. The admin session was an introduction to the administration of Canvas, something we haven’t really seen before, while the fundamentals sessions, the bulk of the training, covered pretty much every other aspect of the system. Together these sessions have given us a good grounding to get started with the deployment of Canvas, and will be followed up with more comprehensive onsite training in a few weeks.

Our contract with Instructure includes their Tier 1 support package which means that they will be taking all of the customer support queries from our staff and students. The support webinar was an introduction to this, covering how their systems and processes work, and how we will access their call logging system to pick up anything that can’t be resolved directly. Happily they are using JIRA, a system I know well.

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Managing Redeployment

Published 15th December 2016

Following the university’s restructure of support staff, a number of people are now in a redeployment position and all managers were asked to attend this HR training session on how to help those staff fit into their new roles. This was principally about the procedures to be followed and paperwork required during a six week trial period beginning in January, but also covered how to set reasonable objectives and on how best to provide feedback.

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When to Refer – Safeguarding and Prevent

Published 28th November 2016

Training on the university’s policies and procedures on how and when to refer staff and students to the various support services which are available, e.g. when people are affected by issues such as bullying, discrimination, disability, health problems, etc. Bundled into this was the university’s obligations with regards to the government’s Prevent Agenda on radicalisation which applies to all far right groups – in the North East the principle group of concern is the EDL. Included in our discussion was how the process of radicalisation typically works, how to spot the signs of potential radicalisation, and most importantly want to do about it, which for myself, and indeed most staff, is simply to refer to the relevant Safeguarding and Prevent Officer for the service.

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SLS Mini Conference

Published 17th December 2014

A short update from the Director and Assistant Directors of SLS on how we are progressing towards meeting our targets as a service which, as we are nearing the end of the three year service plan, has largely become a statement of fact. This was followed by group workshops where we discussed some examples of how we are meeting our shared behaviours: Teamwork, Customer Satisfaction, Continuous Improvement, Customer Focus and Information Sharing.

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Implementation of ITIL in Helpdesk Software

Published 8th December 2014

Had a short internal training session from a colleague in IT Support on how they have implemented ITIL best practice into the University’s helpdesk / customer support system, a customised version of SCSM (Microsoft System Center Service Manager). Of particular interest was their ‘prioritisation matrix’ on how to categorise calls and assign an SLA to them as I can use this to inform development of our own systems and processes for managing customer support within the team.

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Customer Support Report

Published 14th October 2014

customer_support

Something which surprised me about WaLTS when I started was the lack of management information on the work we do to support our customers. There has been a few spot audits to analyse busy periods, but nothing coherent or consistent, so I asked the team to start recording resolved work using a simple form and then presented the results in a report for the benefit of our senior management. Those graphs will take a little time to fill out, but we’re off to a good start.

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Twitter Account

Published 29th April 2014

Today I created a Twitter account for the team and styled the pages in line with the University’s new corporate blue and orange style. I got the ball rolling by posting some tweets, following some interesting TEL people and companies we have relationships with, and created a couple of widgets to post our tweets and a list into a Blackboard course site, just as a proof of concept really, to demonstrate that it can be done and looks pretty. In due course the idea is to have a public organisation for the team where we will have a blog and news, and a page for our Twitter feeds.

https://twitter.com/NorthumbriaTEL

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Customer Support Calls

Published 28th March 2014

In preparation for my official* move to TEL Support my two bosses wanted to know more about the quantity and type of customer support Blackboard and PebblePad require, as I will be transferring the bulk of this work to the Senior Helpline to concentrate on technical admin and content development in TEL Support.

Creating a suitable report was an interesting challenge as there was nothing in SupportWorks, our call logging system, that quite did what was required.

The closest was a report on the number of calls resolved by category and person but it was all in code so I had to combine this with data from other sources, using Access and some joins, to turn the username code in an actual person’s name along with the team there were in, and another data set to convert the category code into the actual human-readable category, ‘INCI-BB00-BB01-BB14’ turns into ‘Incident > Blackboard/eLP > System Issues > Site/Module Content’ for example. Finally I turned the data into a pretty pie chart showing number of calls resolved by team.

The results of this exercise were fascinating. I now know that while I resolved 180 calls during February, which feels about right, our front line Helpline combined resolved a massive 481! I had no idea our front line were fielding and resolving so many calls at the first point of contact – it just goes to show what a great service we have.

* Bureaucracy is a magnificent beast is is not? Almost a month since I got the news no-one is sure if my secondment has actually started yet, though the bulk of my time is now spent doing work either directly for TEL Support or preparing documentation for the Senior Helpline. It also means I have two line managers.

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