Dive Brief:
- Valdosta State University in Georgia improved its response time for virtually all second-tier information technology service calls to 15 minutes by turning student employees into technicians who can be quickly dispatched across campus.
- Campus Technology reports the students went from being lab assistants who mostly watched people use computers to technicians who make rounds, offering preventative maintenance in classrooms, labs, and faculty and staff offices, greatly reducing the number of work orders for IT personnel.
- The student help saves money for the IT department overall, giving other employees more time to focus on more serious problems, and the labs students use to oversee individually are being monitored with cameras so one student can keep an eye on multiple labs at once.
Dive Insight:
Technology-enhanced classrooms have become the norm for a large number of professors on college campuses, in many ways improving the learning environments for students. When the technology doesn’t work, it frustrates instructors and students, and threatens future use of such technology, especially by those faculty who were stepping outside of their comfort zones to try it.
At Valdosta, students make regular rounds to classrooms, making sure everything is functioning properly before the next set of students come in. Besides improving the IT response time, these students, through their preventative care, are likely to have a ripple effect on instructional capacity at the school, something administrators everywhere should be considering.