What Parents Wanna Know

smiltenb — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:04:42 -0600

Each February MICA hosts Parent Weekend -- a time for parents to visit their children at the school, sit in on classes, participate in workshops and meet faculty and staff. This year, Ted and I represented the department by staffing a Technology Systems and Services table at the resource center. Since I don't get out of the office much, it was a great opportunity to meet parents (and students) and find out what kinds of questions they were asking.

The top question was:

MAC or PC?

I'm not sure if this is a bit unique to MICA (as an art school); but nearly every parent wanted to know if the pc or mac that they just bought their child would be sufficient for their education at MICA. Some lamented that they had purchased one system, but due to a change in major by their son or daughter; they were considering purchasing a new system (the opposite of their initial purchase). I couldn't tell if many of the questions were prompted by the fact that my macbook was the only item on our table. Most parents seemed interested to learn that we have the same number of staff dedicated to PC support that we have for MAC support; and that we've been rigorously testing Vista on both MACs and PCs.

The second most popular question had to do with specific technology problems experienced by the students:

These ranged from complaints that a child's internet service in the dorms has "never worked"; to whether we will install software on a student's personal machine. These questions left me wondering what we can do to better publicize our services and better communicate when our systems are not working. It was a bit hard to not walk away from the table feeling disappointed -- after all, we've made an extraordinary effort this year to be more proactive in many areas -- network services in our housing facilities being at the top of the list. I am positive that most of the specific problems raised by parents were never reported by the students.

So where does this leave the Office of Technology Systems and Services? Do we need to be more aggressive about seeking out problems? Do we need to provide more accessible and varied options for students to report problems? Do we need to provide better communications about problems with systems and/or services that we provide? Or are these questions just par for the course in the service (and technology) industry?

We also had a surprising number of parents who asked very pointed questions about the college's commitment to technology and the resources we were planning to provide. These included questions about the nodes on our network and expansion plans; to the number of web services we currently provide to students.

All in all it was an inspiring day.

I'm already looking forward to next year's Parents Weekend as I have big plans and perhaps a big surprise: a few years ago I attended a fantastic presentation at the PeopleSoft Higher Ed User Group conference by Josh Harmon of TCU. The presentation was about how TCU's strategy for giving parents access to student data via the portal -- and the solution that they developed was brilliant and something I've always aspired to steal and deploy to MICA. We're already doing PeopleSoft Enterprise upgrades for Campus Solutions and the Portal for November 2007 -- I can't imagine a more perfect time to provide better services for parents.

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What Parents Wanna Know