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Help from Digital Teaching Consultants Is Now Available in Two Clicks
© Unsplash
About the Project
‘Digital Teaching Consultants’ is a project by the HSE Office for Educational Innovations and Short-Term International Programmes. The IT Office is also involved in the project by digitalizing the project’s processes and analyzing teacher feedback on HSE’s digital services. The consultants support the university’s teachers in relation to the use of remote learning technologies, online tools and services to organize studies in online and hybrid formats. HSE Digital Teaching Assistants will also provide timely assistance to deal with technical issues involving the university’s various digital systems and tools.
How to Get Help
Assistance is available through various convenient channels:
- Via MyHSE Services Account in two clicks: first, click ‘Educational (study) services’, then click ‘Teach for HSE’.
- Via email at consultants@hse.ru.
- Via the ‘Get a consultation’ button on the page ‘Digital Teaching Consultants’ (in Russian).
Direct link to submit requests: ‘Teach for HSE’ application form.
Teachers can also participate in webinars on digital tools. Videos of online classes will be available here. Those interested can subscribe to announcements about the ‘Digital Teaching Consultants’ project here.
How Does It Work?
A Service Desk under the TEACHSUPP project has been set up to help teachers contact consultants anytime, anywhere, and from any device. All employee communications with the consultant service are automatically redirected to the Service Desk, which is implemented in Jira Service Management и Confluence, an integrated digital environment. The use of a digital environment makes it possible to quickly adjust user support procedures, parameters and operations and to create a Knowledge Database.
During the pilot stage, teachers made requests for consultations via their university email accounts and addressed them to specific consultants. The messages were manually registered by specialists. According to Tatevik Izmailyan, Manager of the Unit for Strategic Digital Development and Partnerships, automation of the application submission and processing procedures helped facilitate the administration of the project.
Tatevik Izmailyan
Manager of the HSE Unit for Strategic Digital Development and Partnerships
A teacher creates a request for a consultation via any channel of their choice, which immediately goes to a unified register and is distributed or assigned to a Consultant on Service Desk Jira depending on the topic of the request. In order to resolve issues at the intersection of educational, pedagogical and IT, the Service Desk includes routing processes to the relevant departments of the HSE IT Office. Automation allows users to track the status of their request and evaluate the quality of the consultation they receive, while the consultants can monitor feedback and easily find processed requests using system functions.
The IT Office prepared a course and conducted a series of master classes to help the consultants work effectively in the Jira SD and Confluence integrated digital environment. The participants solved practical problems and looked at real user cases (interaction scenarios). All consultants working in the Service Desk, managing requests and routing them to related projects know how to form and use the Knowledge Database. The results of the course was used to fine-tune the system configuration to ensure that it complies with the consultants’ working requirements.
We have also made it possible to involve the HSE Digital Teaching Consultants in project work: if needed, they can help teachers solve technical tasks and analyze feedback from the HSE Hotline in order to route consultation requests in Service Desk Jira TEACHSUPP.
Olesya Klychikhina
Head of the HSE Unit for Strategic Digital Development and Partnerships
During the project implementation, we managed to create a cross-functional team of teachers and ‘digitalizers’ united by the joint goals of improving the quality of educational process, creating convenient and effective communication channels, and organizing support for employees. Participation in the project gives us valuable experience of personal interaction with university teachers, as well as an opportunity to look at digital transformation processes from a teacher’s perspective. We will continue to support consultants’ work on the Service Desk, provide the ‘Digital Assistants’ project with resources to resolve technical issues with HSE’s digital services, and participate in working groups on the project.
Consultants’ and Teachers’ Perspective
Diana Burimskaya
Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Digital Teaching Consultant
Remote consultations are a response to changing circumstances such as the development of revolutionary technologies in education. This type of support has several advantages. First, teachers can get a consultation online from the comfort of their home. The second important factor is the speed of communication. Both parties can contact each other anytime and as often as necessary. Third, online consultations provide an opportunity to work with several teachers from different cities simultaneously.
Vladimir Pavlov
Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg, Digital Teaching Consultant
For me, participation in the project is an opportunity to help colleagues work remotely, as well as a way to get to grips with the specifics of online teaching myself.
Digital Teaching Consultants is a promising project, since online learning is an integral part of university life today, and help from qualified specialists will only increase in demand. The consultants’ task is to help streamline the teacher’s life: to help them build an online course and create an online community that involves students in the learning process.
Tatiana Khavenson
Director of the Department of Educational Programmes
In September, my colleagues and I started a big course and immediately decided to publish it on SmartLMS. The environment is new to us, and our course has a complicated structure. The consultations (with three consultants) helped us understand how to organize the course on the platform and adjust the assessment process. This ensures that everything is collected on the record sheet and we can maintain continuity from one module to another. We haven’t implemented everything yet, but we now know about the possibilities. Working with consultants is good because you can describe your task in the request, and the consultation will be built around it.