Big IDEA

Wiki to reduce demand for support desk?

09 July 2004

Forgive me while I ramble.

As I am learning to use Tikiwiki I have been reflecting on the sort of site I’d like to build with it. My goal is to help build a site with all sorts of documentation on distance learning and Blackboard that will eventually reduce the emails and phone calls I get for Blackboard support from both students and instructors. I am using the wiki to replace some old-ish documents on using Blackboard, but I’d like it to be much more than that: I’m hoping to have instructors and students get excited and start contributing to it. There’s really only so much I can do; I’ve created a couple of forums, added an FAQ, given students access to the wiki. The idea is to give students an opportunity to give feedback and contribute to nearly everything on the site. But in the end, if they do not participate, it will be a cold and sterile site indeed.

Then I got to thinking about how my experience with free software has influenced the tools I choose, and how others might not be very receptive of them. With free software, there’s usually not a telephone number you can call for support, so I am accustomed to posting in online discussions, email discussion lists, reading the documentation, and googling. I have been quite successful with this and I’m confident I can solve most any technical problem with a few well-asked questions.

Unfortunately my institution has a policy against “unsupported” software, which from what I can gather means anything that doesn’t have an 800 phone support number. Obviously free software falls into this category. As much as I argue that I can often get better support by talking directly to the developers and other users, some folks just need that 800 number.

Anyway, have you ever called a technical support number? Were you satisfied with the experience? I rest my case .

Sometimes being small is a double-edged sword. It’s good that I can experiment, but it’s bad that there are not many students that can participate in the community. I wonder if any larger institutions have invited students to essentially help write documentation or provide support with little formal structure?

If this thing flies, I expect to find more autonomous learners. That would be both students and faculty.

Oh, and hopefully I can convince some faculty to blog, since Tikiwiki makes it rather easy to set up multiple blogs.

BTW, my instance of Tikiwiki is here: IDEA Center Wiki.