University of South Florida students can still scour the school’s website, make a phone call, or venture over to the campus’s help desk to answer pressing technology questions. Or they can log onto Facebook.
IT officials on the Tampa campus said this fall that help desk services would be available on the world’s most popular social media site, although the university didn’t promise students immediate answers to their burning questions.
Students who have immediate questions about the campus’s network or library computers, though, might revert to the traditional help desk.
Read more about help desks in higher education…
Students’ Facebook questions will be answered “within hours” of posting the queries to the USF InformaBull page, said Kevin Banks, assistant vice president and dean of students at USF.
“Facebook was a natural fit to making this work – it is accessible to virtually everyone, has the features we needed, and there is no learning curve because students already use the site extensively,” Banks said in a statement, adding that students will save “time and possible frustration trying to figure out the answer themselves.”
“We realized a real-time service to provide students with fast and accurate answers to their USF questions would be very helpful,” he said.
USF’s attempt to move traditional help desk functions to the social web could be a welcomed alternative in higher education: a report released in December called for a technological makeover of campus help desks after years of falling behind student and faculty technology demands.
Seven out of 10 schools can’t hold online chats with their campus technology support staff, according to a national report on technology help-desk services published by support solutions company Bomgar.
Tech-support experts said that while campus help-desk services are understaffed and overworked, an instant chat option—which has become commonplace in private industry—would be one way to help campus technology support staff answer frequently asked questions, known as “break-fix” and “how-do-I” queries.
Higher education had an overall first call resolution rate of 62 percent, just below the 64-percent average across all industries.
Higher education’s approach to help-desk services is also one of the priciest in the entire support services industry, according to the Bomgard report.
About eight in 10 education respondents said their campus’s help desk provides support to faculty and students who walk up to a help desk and place a request.
In-person help, according to the report, is twice as expensive as online chat support and also is pricier than eMail and phone support.
USF is one of the first universities to encourage students to use Facebook as a virtual help desk, although other schools have used the social site to answer students’ technology-related queries, including the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Ind., St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and Central Michigan University (CMU) in Mount Pleasant, Mich.
Recent posts on CMU’s Facebook help desk page include warnings about fraudulent eMail messages being sent to students, and a reminder that help desk employees can help reset passwords, fix printers, and help students who have encountered the “blue screen of death” on their laptops.
“In a bind? Call us,” the page reads.
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