Most of my time there has been pretty confusing. I thought I would be met with some form of training as to how everything was generally structured, but have had to piece that together bit by bit. Expectations are never set out and after the semi-recent buyout of the colllege by a company that's attempting to build an online college platform (and frankly failing), the leadership, or lack their of, is flailing. Most nights I have a set of tasks to accomplish involving running updates or moving staff PCs and furniture around, but then am simultaneously supposed to be monitoring submitted tickets, as well as the various tech support chats in their proprietary learning platform, which is little more than a chat app than anything, and a bad one at that. I have notifications enabled on my phone, which works decently well with the submitted support tickets, but awful on their platform. When I am able to more actively respond to support requests, there's little more that I can do besides notifying someone higher up and pray they actually respond. The worst offender of this is Tom, who is the person I'm told to directly address with issues like these, but then rarely does, or finds issues with whatever attempts I made. Additionally since he's in Texas, he's long been asleep by the time I do send in requests. My main coworker Kai, is friendly but doesn't really like me. He puts on a friendly face, but I see the way he does the same with the students. Little comments here and there lets the mask slip.
The worst thing we have to deal with are these mobile hotspots with students with poor internet. Somehow these things fail at an alarming rate and there's little more we can do than ship out a replacement, which I can't controll. In fact I have no clue who manages them and whenever I bring it to Kai he just gets frustrated. Most of the time after I run through the procedural reboots and checking of updates, they stop responding to my messages and the ticket magically gets dealt with in the morning by Alex. I've only met him a couple of times, but he seems to take this job so seriously to the detrement to his mental well being. I don't want to throw it all on him, but he's the only one that gets things done when it comes to hotspots.
It doesn't help that our students, or at least the ones that send in requests, are frankly severly unskilled. I don't want to be mean, but when they fail to be able to send a coherent message in a support request, it seriously makes me question their ability to succeed to any amount of academic rigor. Some of them do seem to have some ability, but would be much better off at a traditional community college. The way the company is set up seems to be predatory, targeting low income students with the promise of a future career, while maintaining a tuition just below what would be covered by a Pell grant, so that there's little actual cost to the student. And at the end of it all, being only an associates degree, from a no-name, for-profit, online school, I doubt will carry much actual return on investment, something that they could have gotten from a local community college.
I regularly check my email, If I don't respond quickly, send me a poke:
jasco.website@pm.me