Here are some notes on two additional Educause sessions – one from the conference that Janet and I watched a while back, and the other one a webinar.

Educause Session: Customer Centric Transformation

This presentation came from the New School (I happen to know the Provost there, in case we need to reach out and learn more…). The presentation focused on the Helpdesk and its previous struggles, so their ITS team decided to create a new position focusing on improving the Helpdesk. A couple of takeaways:

  • Ask different questions, like what motivates, what is the interest, what are they really complaining about? How is this good for our students?
  • Work on culture, not just strategies to create change
  • Using the SWARM methodology, which, as I understand it, is an adapted agile methodology to create different work flows (review, communicate, resolve – not review, escalate)
  • lots of emphasis on customer satisfaction surveys – one that looked interesting was a one-question survey of satisfaction with emoticons (similar to what you may have seen in airports to show whether you are happy with the bathrooms)
  • Does our Helpdesk have a Moodle course for student training?

Educause Webinar: Leveraging Digital Transformation Principles to Effect Institutional Change

Yes, that is the title, the typo makes me cringe. November 4th. Useful web site about a model for digital transformation. Here is their strategy:

Design your DX strategy with 6 steps: purpose - context - impact - outcomes - outputs - inputs

The three institutions who discussed were UMBC (revising the student experience), Ithaca College (new LMS), Minnesota State System (new Workday implementation)