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96 Building and Maintaining an Expert Student Support Staff
Karen
McRitchie, Grinnell College
Student staff can be an important part of the
college’s IT support structure. They
are a dynamic resource; yet do have some benefits over hiring full-time
employees. At Grinnell College, we
created a program of student support staff called User Consultants or UCs. From the initial training of these students,
the resources available, on-going communication, and evaluation, we have an
innovative program that has fulfilled high standards of support for our student
users on campus.
From their initial interview, the new UC Trainees go
through a comprehensive training program including some classroom instruction,
independent projects and mentoring by a senior UC during actual lab
shifts. UCs are trained to provide
student support one-on-one in the public labs and phone support for students in
the dorms.
In order to maintain a dynamic support team of
students, we have developed a web-based resource center. This allows our UCs to have many resources
available from their computer anywhere on campus. The resource site has the scheduling/shift swapping program, FAQ,
knowledge base, time sheets, handbooks, administrative communication, threaded
discussion board, chat and many other tools that are necessary for a highly
skilled student support team. Everything is web-accessible which gives us the
flexibility to meet the demands of the student’s schedules and locations. The students developed some of the resources
and several third-party applications have also been integrated.
It is important with any support model to continually evaluate and redesign it as necessary to fulfill the needs of your user community, in this case, students. We provide this evaluation and redesign as necessary and try to maintain a high level of communication with both our student staff and student users. It has been a successful program with the talents and expertise contributed by both the IT and student staff.
Keywords: students, support, labs, staffing, web resources