The largest group of new students in the history of the School of Health Professions arrived on August 23rd for fall term pre-orientation. Our team at Academic Technology Services took a new approach to student orientation and account setup this year. Last year was our first full year using Sakai and we experienced a heavy load of support requests from students during the first few weeks of the term. Most of these requests were related to password reset and VPN access issues and often occurred at a time of crisis, such as when a student was about to take a test.
This year we decided to head off problems by helping each student individually during pre-orientation to guarantee that everyone could log in to Sakai, connect to the VPN and access the internal WiFi network.
So how did it go? Overall, pretty well. Here's a list of good and not-so-good results:
The Good
- More than 90% of the students were fully set up by the end of pre-orientation.
- Account setup, network access and library orientation efforts were integrated to minimize duplication and conflicting information.
- The students were incredibly patient and gracious, even when dealing with frustrating issues.
- Support requests during the early weeks of the term have been greatly reduced compared to last year. The urgency level of the requests has also gone down.
- Sakai account access was very smooth - much easier than most of the other systems involved. This is great because Sakai is home base for most student course work.
The Not-So-Good
- Wait times for the individual setup sessions with students were often long.
- A number of students had incorrect account names created due to manual typos. The accounts had to be corrected, resulting in delays and confusion.
- Email accounts were automatically created for most students, but not all. We're not sure why the automated process failed.
- The complexity of options for network connectivity and account login can be overwhelming for students.
Lessons Learned
- Allow more time for account setup. The challenge questions for VPN and password self-service take an especially long time to set up.
- Simplify the connectivity options inside the School. Do we need different network access privileges inside the classrooms and in the student computer areas? It's difficult for students to understand why they have to change their connection approach just because they moved to a different room.
- Establish a baseline for supported student operating systems. We found that students had various flavors of XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS. In some cases our most experienced support people weren't able to set up WiFi due to quirky configurations.
Based on the reduction in support requests we are making progress. Next year should be even better.
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