Key Questions and Indicators

The key questions of this chapter are divided between procedures and personnel, although these issues are as related as two sides to one coin. While support rules of thumb have been recognized for business settings, schools still operate on a comparative shoestring. Recommendations for support levels do exist (see "Four Ways to Ensure Quality Tech Support in Schools").

Key Question 1. Are resources and processes in place to maintain school technology?

Technology has not yet fully established itself in the school setting, as it has in many business sectors. When the network goes down in a school or district, the administrators, teachers, and students just wait until it comes back up. Any information lost may not be restored. In the instructional setting, preparing for an outage may mean that teachers file printouts as backup materials. The same outage in the business world can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales; lost instructional time has not been valued in the same way. Yet, as schools rely more and more on the use of technology (both administratively and instructionally), the loss of time and information is increasingly understood to be expensive and disruptive to the learning process. Maintenance and backup systems are therefore begining to be recognized as important throughout the school setting.

This key question assesses maintenance and support systems in terms of the number of maintenance incidents, the amount of downtime, and the stages of response to a request for maintenance; provisions for preventive maintenance; access to FAQ resources and technical manuals; backup and disaster recovery procedures; replacement and upgrade procedures; and diagnostic and repair procedures.

INDICATORS

TERM DEFINITIONS AND CATEGORIES

Cause of maintenance incident, categories: human error; software failure; hardware failure; network switching device or router failure; network cable or wiring failure; wireless system failure.

Downtime: the amount of time a machine or system spends in an inoperable state; alternatively, the amount of time between a call for maintenance and the resolution of the problem.

Technical manual location categories: at workstation; in classroom or laboratory; in library or other building central location; at district office or technology support office; online through local resources; online through vendor or other remote resource.

Key Question 2. Are personnel available to provide technical support?

As schools commit more funds to the purchase of technology, they must also look at the support needed by the end users of these purchases. Most school systems have designated an office of technology support, but rarely do tech support personnel work directly with school staff. Usually, the only times tech support visits a school is when there is a major infrastructure malfunction or new equipment is being installed. Even more rarely can central-office technology support personnel be of assistance in educating users, say, on how a software package works.

The majority of support personnel time is focused on acquiring, installing, and maintaining hardware and the technology infrastructure. The ratio of end users (or computers) to professional support personnel is generally very high (see sidebar topics "Four Ways to Ensure Quality Tech Support in Schools" and "Tech Support Rule-of-Thumb"). As schools record the levels of support staffing and maintenance incidents, they can work to determine acceptable support ratios.

Much support for instructional staff comes from volunteer or part-time technology coordinators, working on donated time or in addition to other instructional obligations. Help desks are still a relative rarity. Use of students in these roles is not uncommon.

Indicators for this key question assess numbers of support personnel and full-time-equivalent (FTE) hours, the extent to which support personnel have other responsibilities within the school system, the total number of person-hours of technical support committed, and various ratios-of support calls to FTE staff hours, of support staff to the number of computers, and of support staff to the number of users.

INDICATORS

TERM DEFINITIONS AND CATEGORIES

Full-time-equivalent (FTE) support staff hours: Total number of hours committed by support staff (equals the sum of FTE levels for each support staff person).

Primary area of responsibility, categories: Part-time teacher; full-time teacher; part-time administrator; full-time administrator; student; outsource contractor; volunteer; school staff technology support specialist; district staff technology support specialist.

Many of the above indicators might be derived from their inclusion in the support portion of a school's technology plan, which clearly should extend from the classroom to the central office. Some possible components of this plan could be district help desks, a workable staffing ratio of support personnel to end users or computers, and the degree of outsourcing for technology support. The implementation of these plan components could lead to the development of other indicators for this key question.

Unit Record Structure

As stated, almost all of the data for the indicators listed above can be derived from the support portion of a school's technology plan. Other sources of information could be the school district's maintenance system for technology equipment, an incident tracking system (which may be computerized), or maintenance agreements with outside vendors.

The identifiable units for recording purposes related to maintenance support are each incident, each technical support staff person, and each piece of equipment requiring repair.

The data elements listed below can be used to create the indicators listed in this chapter. The complete list of data elements for this guide can be found in Appendix A; a number of detailed examples illustrating the creation of indicators from data elements can be found in Appendix B.

LIST OF POTENTIAL DATA ELEMENTS FOR A UNIT RECORD: SAMPLE UNIT RECORD FOR INCIDENT DATA

For each incident:

Incident demographics

• Incident control ID-a unique number identifier for the call
• School ID-a unique number identifier for the school
• Equipment ID-this will supply information as to type variables, cost/financial variables, use variables, and warranty information
• Software ID
• Incident date-the date the incident was called in
• Incident time-the time the incident was first called in
• Initial incident cause category-the initial indication as to the cause (human, software, hardware, network [router/switch, wiring])
• Symptoms-a description of what was/is happening with the equipment

Incident resolution

• Date picked up-the date the equipment was transported to the repair facility
• Trip #-the unique ID number for the actual pickup/delivery
• Status-current information concerning state of repair (categories: waiting; in repair; holding for parts; completed; returned to owner)
• Repairs made-a description of what was done to resolve the problem
• Repair date-the date the equipment was repaired
• Parts used
• Parts cost
• Labor hours-number of hours needed to resolve the problem, including pickup and delivery
• Incident cause (categories: human error; software failure; hardware failure; network switching device or router failure; network cable or wiring failure; wireless system failure)
• How repaired (at service location, picked up by staff, at service location, brought in by user; if software, by download, through telephone guidance to user by service staff)
• Location of repair (at school, at district central office, at contractor location, at vendor location)
• Date returned-the date the equipment was transported the point of pickup
• Time and date stamp for when record was last modified
• Incident resolution provider ID(s)
• Hours spent on incident

For each support person:

• Name
• Provider ID
• Location of provider (school building, central district office, outside location)
• Primary role: part-time teacher, full-time teacher, part-time administrator, full-time administrator, student, outsource contractor, volunteer, school-level tech support specialist, district-level tech support specialist (school system employee)
• FTE hours assigned to tech support
• Hours per month spent on different activities: repair of equipment; wiring/cabling; training of school personnel (other than technology support); training of technology support staff; help desk calls; network administration; initial installation of hardware; initial installation of software; hardware upgrades; software upgrades; technology support management (planning, budgeting/purchasing, etc.)

Records kept and aggregated at workstation, building, or district level.