The summer of ’18

It has been a hot, busy summer in the world of Technology-Enhanced Learning at Aston. Apart from integrating the new members of the team, we have been developing a whole raft of new initiatives and content to support staff.

Support for new staff

We have put in place a number of support opportunities for new staff.

• All new members of staff should be contacted by the relevant technologist for the school within one month of starting. They will be offered a 1-to-1 “Introduction to TEL at Aston”. This lasts 1 hour and takes the form of a discussion, that highlights Aston’s TEL provision. It’s also an opportunity to discuss future training sessions to get new staff up to speed on all of the learning technologies that you will need to use.
• There is a “self-service” online Academic Technology Induction that gives hands-on practical training and guidance to the learning technologies that are used at Aston. It doesn’t only cover the technology but also some of the related university policies and processes. Three pathways, based on academic roles, have been created to guide staff through the content.

Online Support

All support materials in the TLC website have been updated to reflect changes in software. We have also taken the bold step to change the conceptual idea regarding how the content is presented.

In the past, we were attempting to present the full tool overview to take you from knowing nothing about the tool to knowing everything… well maybe not everything but enough to get you going. With the development of the new staff support routes mentioned above, we decided that this wasn’t correct any longer. We have changed the focus of how each tool is presented, in order to highlight the most common actions that staff and students normally wish to complete. Hopefully, this should make it easier to find the content that you are looking for.

We have also created a new website which again has a changed focus in terms of content presentation. http://telsupport.tlc.aston.ac.uk

Contacting us

That’s right you guessed it, there are also some new ways that you can get in touch with us to request help and support. In the past, we had separate email addresses for each of the systems we supported. We now have a single point of contact that you should send all requests to. Eventually, the old addresses will be depreciated, but in the short term, we will continue to redirect them.

•  Email: telsupport@aston.ac.uk
•  Telephone: 0121 204 4885
•  Twitter: @astonTEL

 

If you making a technical support request please always include as much information as possible, such as:

• any related module code.
• the system you are having problems with.
• dates and times of any problems.
• screenshots where appropriate. When making screenshots if you can include as much of the screen as possible (including the URL for web-based systems), it will often help us diagnose the problem.

Before contacting the TEL Helpdesk, please check the TEL Support Hub. This gives answers to many queries received by the TEL Helpdesk. Also, check the @AstonTEL Twitter page to see if there is a known problem with the service.

Rest assured that over the coming months the academic practice guidance for staff will also receive some attention. A sound pedagogic underpinning in the use of technology is as, if not more, important than knowing which button to click.