Epic Support for the Hero's Journey: A Human-Centered, Sustainable EdTech Support Model for the Digital Future

Concurrent Session 4
Streamed Session

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Session Materials

Brief Abstract

How do you support your campus heroes on their educational journeys? Join us in exploring a sustainable tech support model for LMS integrated tools! You will leave the session with a different approach on supporting your students, faculty, and staff to take back to your institution.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: T. Adam Baldry, Pima Community College

Adam is an Instructional Technologist at Pima Community College. He earned his Master of Arts Degree in East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. During his Master's degree studies Adam focused on historical Chinese Chan (Zen) Buddhism. It was during his time as a graduate student that Adam discovered his passion for educational technologies. As a trained humanist, Asianist, technologist, and teacher, he seeks to incorporate simplicity and open-mindedness into all he does.

Co-presenter: Bradley Butler, Pima Community College

Brad Butler serves as an Instructional Technologist - Tech Innovation and Pilots for Digital Learning. For the first 13 years of his career, Brad served as a high school teacher in Tucson covering the content areas of World History, United States History, Geography, and American Government. While teaching, he served as the point person for both staff and students when it came to technology and aided in many educational technology initiatives in his teaching career. Before joining the Digital Learning team, Brad worked as the Course Design Specialist for the College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture at the University of Arizona. He is an advocate for the positive change that education can have on people and loves how technology can improve educational opportunities for everyone. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking and baking with his wife, trying to wear out their two Dachshund-mix rescue dogs, spinning, and playing board games.

Co-presenter: Danielle Dolan-Sanchez, University of Arizona

Additional Authors

Extended Abstract

Developing a sustainable, human-centered EdTech support model is essential to facilitating the success of your campus “heroes” (students, faculty, and staff). When supporting third party tools integrated with an LMS, a collaborative model that focuses on users without depleting resources like time and energy is essential. This presentation will provide insights and takeaways from our team’s support model that has been developed and expanded since 2019.

Our award-winning instructional technologies team supports 50,000+ staff, faculty, and students. We offer proactive training and direct tech support on third party tools that integrate with our LMS. Our support model reaches beyond reactive tech support to empower our instructors and students across our university on their own learning journeys to collaborate, create community, and develop skills.

In this educational session, we will provide an overview of our current EdTech support model. Participants will have the option to participate through a standard Zoom presentation or explore the heroes' realm in Mozilla Hubs. Attendees that opt to participate in Mozilla Hubs will be able to interact with the presenters and other participants while learning about our sustainable, human-centered support model. Within Hubs, participants will talk and walk through the process of comparing and contrasting tech support models, allowing audience members to sail away with the beginnings of ideas for adjusting their own models to best serve their heroes.

After introducing some of our institution’s LMS-integrated tools, some of the team members will take the audience on an odyssey through the support and service model we have set up in order to find success for both users and the team itself with a human-centered approach. We will discuss how we run tech support between different team members and manage tickets, emphasizing how we make this process sustainable. We will also discuss the strategies we use in implementing support for third-party tools, which include documents, webinars, and training, demonstrating this with examples from our website and snippets from a recorded webinar.

Finally, we will describe how building and maintaining relationships with vendors is beneficial to the sustainable support model. We will briefly illustrate our methods of outreach to students, faculty, and staff that help us stand out amongst the many technology support entities on our large campus, as well as the value of cross-campus collaboration with these other tech support teams in supporting tools. To finish the presentation, participants will explore Mozilla Hubs where they will discuss takeaways from the presentation and have a Q&A session if time allows. 

Takeaways:

By sharing the experiences of our team, we hope to spark new ideas for supporting integrated EdTech tools to existing tech support teams, and inspire audience members to build a model of support that is collaborative, sustainable, and human-centered.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

  • Seize the sword of opportunity to incorporate characteristics of human-centered design in their tech support models
  • Deploy effective strategies to meet heroes where they are at in their education journeys
  • Ease their heroes’ journeys by incorporating sustainable support practices
  • Compose their own version of the hero’s journey by overcoming common pitfalls of outdated support models that are ill-equipped for the future of online and blended learning