Three preparatory steps will set the stage for the implementation of your service to go smoothly:
How we handled or are handling each of these processes is described below.
Our stakeholders met for several weeks to define BAYU and determine its scope before it was implemented. The group included representatives of various interests across campus:
Your campus may require a different mix of people. The key is to bring together representatives from groups who will build, use, be affected by, or be responsible for the service. You may wish to include students at some point in your meetings.
The list that follows, by no means exhaustive, shows some of the important decisions this group made, based on the underlying philosophy that BAYU would be educational in nature and would respect students' privacy:
BAYU would
BAYU would
BAYU would not
Your planning group will need to make similar decisions, as well as others, based on your campus and its environment. You will need to consult your own legal counsel regarding your decisions. (See Scalabilty.)
In order for BAYU to be a success, we needed the support of stakeholders. Of course, we needed buy-in from the administration in order to implement the service, but in order for it to be accepted and useful, we also needed the support of the most affected groups, especially students.
The originator of the BAYU concept secured support through these steps:
As you decide who on your campus needs to understand and support your service, you will need to educate them, answer their questions, and address their concerns. If you have no single person willing or able to conduct this important step, you will need to consider how you will share the task.
Developing infrastructure was critical to the successful implementation of BAYU. We did not simply put technology in place without taking preparatory steps that helped it run smoothly from the beginning. Here's what we did:
Each of these items is covered in greater detail below.
The BAYU website educates users of the network (currently students living in on-campus housing) about
It also explains the philosophy behind the service and provides answers to frequently asked questions.
The website has five sections:
You will, of course, create your own website according to your own service, resources, and IT policies.
We designed and wrote the following documents to be used in and with BAYU:
You may need to develop other documents, depending on the parameters and set up of your service.
We set up four types of support for students:
We cannot judge which of the four types of support is most used because we cannot judge exactly who uses what information from the website. Also, we do not track the reasons why people come to the campus computer centers for help. However, we do know that students use the e-mail support more often than they use the phone support.
Our IT Central Services help desk handles the e-mail and phone requests. The help desk staff developed prepared answers to the eight most common questions and made revisions as needed. On rare occasions, the staff consults with behind-the-scenes technical resources for additional help.
We did not train help desk personnel to handle BAYU-related calls beyond providing the prepared answers. Unfortunately, prepared answers need to be somewhat generic and therefore may not be as helpful to individual students as they (and we) would like. We can provide only generic answers because, in the interest of protecting student privacy, the service does not retain specific data for each instance of uploading for an extended time. Therefore, we usually cannot tell an individual student in detail what his or her computer was doing at the time of the upload. We have not yet found a solution to this "catch-22."
Our residence hall computing staff handles the in-person requests for help at campus computing centers. For example, they might help a student remove or disable the uploading function of a particular technology on the student's computer.
Residence hall computing staff receive some training on copyright issues which mentions BAYU.
You will want to think through your needs and resources when you set up your support structure and delegate the work accordingly. Most likely, existing staff will be able to handle the number of technical requests prompted by the service.
©2009 The Regents of the University of Michigan
