LMS Weekly Update: Customer service is No. 1 job for Brightspace Ambassadors
Posted on Monday, January 14th, 2019
Keshana King bubbles over with enthusiasm as she describes how the Brightspace Ambassadors are assisting new students at Algonquin College this term.
“Our program is most beneficial to students just out of high school who are completely new to the college experience and have never used a Learning Management System,” says King, Brightspace Ambassador Program Coordinator with Learning and Teaching Services. She notes it’s also especially useful to many mature students, people who are getting used to technology after a long break or who didn’t work with technology in their previous work experience, and international students.
“International students face huge changes coming to a new country, and Brightspace can be one of them. It’s a great feeling to be able to help people because you’re a student helping other students, knowing that they’re going through what you’ve gone through.”
King is a student in the Business Management and Entrepreneurship program at Algonquin College who began volunteering with the Brightspace Ambassadors in the fall. She took over as program coordinator in December and says her work aligns well with her studies and future ambitions.
“A lot of my studies deal with customer service, working with others. I’m also taking some project management and business management courses, so it fits right in with what I’m doing now. The skills I’m learning here, working with people and establishing deadlines, getting things done, is going to be invaluable when I start a business after I graduate.”
Thirty-one volunteers are working with their fellow students this month; 18 are veterans of the fall sessions. But the winter program they have returned to is different in a number of ways. Now there is a more comprehensive training program for the volunteers, which makes use of the knowledge gathered in the fall sessions.
“We have also been able to help our volunteers distinguish between the issues we can and cannot solve,” King says. A system of tiers was developed to handle the problems students typically encounter when they begin using Brightspace. The first tier comprises problems the ambassadors can solve right away, such as turning on notifications, accessing content in a quiz, even just getting people logged in.
“Through last semester we were also able to determine what issues we cannot solve here,” she says. “Most of these are in the second tier. There might be IT problems that have to be redirected to IT Services. Or a student will come to us saying they can’t access certain content that their professor has put up. Chances are the professor hasn’t made it available yet, so we’ll send students to the professor to sort it out.”
Tier three is reserved for the less frequent problems with Brightspace itself – software issues, for instance, or bugs — where use of the online Brightspace Community is often the best option.
Demand for the ambassadors’ help has been steady; hundreds of students will have called on their help by the end of this week. Two locations were open during the first weeks of the term, one in the ACCE Building and one in Student Central. Just one, the Student Central location, continues to offer assistance through the end of the day on Jan. 18, when the Ambassador program closes. Subsequent student support for Brightspace will be handled by the ITS Client Care Group located in Student Central.
The most frequent problem students bring to the ambassadors? “Logging in,” says King. “How to get into Brightspace, getting their network account information onto ACSIS, logging into not only Brightspace but also Wi-Fi because you need this to access Brightspace and all the other College apps. Logging in is problem No. 1.”
The team is also frequently asked general questions about how to use the LMS. For these, students are directed to the detailed Brightspace Essentials (Students) course online; there is a prize awaiting some lucky individual who completes the course by Jan. 31. New students who do so will be entered into a draw to win two tickets to the Arkells’ Rally Cry Tour at the Canadian Tire Centre Feb. 15.
King says she wouldn’t hesitate to encourage other students to become Brightspace Ambassadors in future iterations of the program.
“I’ve met so many people, learned so much and enjoyed being able to help other students during a pretty stressful time for them,” she says. “It’s been incredible.”
Brightspace Ambassadors are available through Jan. 18 in C036 in Student Central from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Beginning Jan. 21, student help is available from the ITS Client Care Group in Student Central.
- Posted in
- What's New