Creating a Help Center for the University of Minnesota online faculty.
Instructional Design, Interaction Design
2 MONTHS - INDIVIDUAL PROJECT
Help Center is a fully-integrated support site within the Canvas LMS that centralizes a ticketing system, help guides, and an online instruction design community to support faculty managing their course sites and develop their knowledge base.
Tools
Canvas LMS, Drupal 8, HTML/CSS, Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop
Methods
Wireframing, Web Development, Instructional Design
The Challenge
Canvas is a learning management system (LMS) used by the University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing and Professional Studies (CCAPS) to facilitate online learning in blended and fully-online courses.
After migrating from the previous LMS Moodle, instructors at CCAPS had to relearn how to properly maintain their course sites. Time and resources for faculty development were limited. While instructors received an initial face-to-face training on how to use and manage their course sites, ongoing training and support was needed to support faculty.
‘Teaching Tip’ videos featuring common issues seen by the end user support, were distributed to faculty via a newsletter and YouTube Channel, however they were underutilized and difficult to locate. End user support repeatedly corresponded with faculty over the same set of issues in their course sites.
Design Challenge
How could we make these end user support resources and knowledge base more accessible to faculty so they can make the best use of their course site?
Faculty were suffering from cognitive overload. Getting help with your Canvas course site - whether by contacting a representative in end user support, watching teaching tips videos, or referring to Canvas guides - involved visiting a series of external sites.
Design Approach
The philosophy behind the design is that faculty should be able to find answers to what they need directly within their course site without keeping track of a growing list of websites.
Canvas’s open API offered the opportunity to integrate a support site directly in the learning management system, so instructors can get help with just a click of a button. Centralizing the robust help guides and forums from Canvas Help Guides, a ticketing system to track and manage support issues and build a knowledge base, and a higher learning community, creates a streamlined and user-centered experience that empowers instructors to use their course sites.
Ticketing System
Responding to emails from faculty who needed help with their course sites was a responsibility with growing scope. Faculty could contact end user support with issues via email.
End user support routinely received emails to respond to the same sorts of issues. Systematically capturing and managing support issues using a ticketing system simplifies the process of end user support by allowing solutions to be recorded through a shared knowledge base, allowing the development team to focus more time on tackling more challenging design problems.
Instructor Stories
Nurturing a community of higher learning in the online and blended space is vital to improving post-secondary institutions. Carefully designed faculty development approaches can facilitate and create a culture that supports a thoughtful focus on teaching in the online space.
Using blog posts and video platforms to share success stories enriches the online teaching community at CCAPS.
Teaching Tips
Ongoing professional development was also achieved by building a knowledge base for faculty in the form of short, condensedTeaching Tip videos.
Teaching Tips videos produced by the design team used to be distributed via email. The new layout houses them directly in the Help Center, so faculty can easily access them without hunting through different system.
