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Initiatives

 

 

Current Initiatives


Classroom Support

Classroom support is our highest priority. It is in the classrooms where our students receive their education, hence, we must excel in the tech support we provide to faculty in the classrooms. To help us improve and measure our quality of work, we ask faculty for their feedback as their classroom-support-related requests are closed. Our goal is to obtain a monthly Customer Satisfaction rating of 93% or better.

 


 

Classroom Audio-Visual Equipment Refresh

Enhance teaching and learning experiences in classrooms across campus by keeping AV infrastructure up to date to ensure faculty’s latest devices and applications are supported. To keep up with major AV technology changes we must implement a five-year refresh cycle of the AV equipment in a classroom. As a reference, we have 282 classrooms for semester course assignments. With a limited budget, we must prioritize classrooms by usage.

 


 

Improve Student Experience and Engagement in Large Lecture Halls

The instructor’s podiums in the large lecture halls at the Undergraduate Learning Center are mostly empty. Because of the large footprint of the current podiums, instructors are limited in space in the front of the room. We believe that making more space available on the front stage will be welcomed by our instructors. Additionally, more space will allow for more flexibility for the use of the front stage during special events such as panel discussions.

 


 

Maintenance of Services Catalog Pages

We use the Information Resources’ Services Catalog to display the IT services offered to the UTEP community. The Catalog provides our UTEP faculty, students, and staff with an overview of the services and how to request them. The goal of this initiative is to ensure that the information on over seventy plus IT services remain relevant and up to date. The team will need to collaborate with service owners to accomplish this initiative.

 


 

Improve Student Experience with Online Equipment Booking System

Equipment Checkout services/operations changed during and after the pandemic. This led to the temporary disabling of our online reservation feature. We need to solidify and establish the new processes to re-enable this feature for an improved customer experience.

 


 

Enhance the Incident Management System

Our customers use traditional communication methods such as telephones and emails to open a support request for IT help. Nowadays, newer communication methods exist and are used by our customers, and we shall enable these to connect with us. Additionally, we need to create more self-serve resources for our customers to be able to fix common technology-related issues on their own.

Another aspect of the incident management system is the request form that our users submit to ask for IT help. In this form, there are mandatory fields that do not apply to all request types. For example, the form asks for the customer’s location and room number for a Question Pro (cloud-based app) issue. The idea is for this form to ask only request-related questions based on the requested service. We must look for ways for this form to dynamically adapt based on user input to expedite form submissions.

 


 

Improve customer satisfaction by increasing first-level resolution rates

First Level Resolution (FLR) is a crucial component of customer satisfaction. FLR is the ability of first-line personnel to resolve support requests without the need to escalate to other often limited specialized IT individuals. The higher the FLR is, the more first-line staff resolves more support requests at their level and hence improving customer satisfaction.

Technology Support Analysts are the first-line personnel in Information Resources at UTEP. To increase FLR rates, our Technology Support Analysts must possess a wide range of knowledge and expertise. Leadership must allocate the resources necessary to keep these individuals knowledgeable and up-to-date with the latest technologies.

 


 

Engaging Students, A Workshop Series for Faculty

UTEP faculty were recently surveyed and cited student engagement being a major challenge in their courses. In collaboration with faculty, the Center for Instructional Design, and the Center for Faculty Leadership and Development, we need to develop a training series for faculty designed to effectively engage students synchronously and asynchronously. Based on the student survey conducted by an Information Resources led committee in the fall of 2021, students indicated that the following learning activities kept them engaged: group discussions, recorded course concepts or lectures, polling, and gaming.

 


 

Set up Blackboard Institutional Hierarchy

Blackboard Institutional Hierarchy serves as the foundation for making Blackboard Data available for leadership, tool cleanup, and separating permissions as needed. We need to set this up to take advantage of the benefits and to be ready for any strategies that may require access to student data from our learning management system.

 


 

Streamline Mac Authentication

Binding Apple computers to the domain is challenging. This results in not only issues with the setup of new apple computers, but also with the synching of passwords when users change their passwords. JAMF Connect will allow authentication to Azure AD replacing on-premises Active Directory authentication.

 


 

Improve the Printing Experience for Students

We have reached the end of support for the print release devices with our current print management solution. In addition, higher education is no longer a priority for this vendor. We need to explore and evaluate other print management solutions and transition to a more robust system that will improve the overall print experience for our students.

 


 

Increase Security on Windows Devices

We have identified that many of our vulnerabilities are with third-party applications installed on devices using Windows Operating System. Third-party patch management will be essential to address these vulnerabilities as it will allow us to push critical updates to minimize the risk of vulnerabilities with these applications.

 


 

UTEP TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT

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