Importance of Support Personnel in Online Education

Online Education requires the help of many support personnel to be successful.  From technical support personnel, course designers, administration, to recruiters and enrollment specialists, the range of positions exist to aid and assist online learners and educators in multiple ways.  The importance of support personnel is hard to understate.  According to Zawacki-Richter  (n.d.), “…in comparison with traditional distance education, support in online education is of even greater importance…” He gives the following three reasons why:  Learners in distance education have more responsibility than their face to face counterparts; the skills required to do online learning must be developed; and faculty must have support in the areas of promoting, developing, and implementing online learning.  Below is a list of three support personnel with a description of their responsibilities. 

Intake/Onboarding:  These paraprofessionals work with families and students who are new to online schooling in order to assist them in transitioning to the online environment.  They contact families often in the first two weeks of enrollment.  Their primary responsibility is to oversee and provide support, direction, and guidance to these new families and students.  They oversee completion of critical tasks, answer questions, and provide resources such as tutorials, directions, handbooks and more refer students to other support personnel as necessary.  They intervene when progress isn’t being made in order to help families achieve success.  Once families are ready, they are transitioned to a permanent teacher.

Technical support:  Shamsy (2014) reports that tech support personnel provide assistance with many aspects of technological issues which might arise as a result of the technology itself or the experience/knowledge of the user/student.  In some institutions, individuals have been hired with the sole responsibility to offer tech support to students, teachers, and administration.  In other institutions, tech support may be handled by the teacher or a combination of both tech support personnel and teachers.  She gives advantages and disadvantages of both of these scenarios.  Tech support personnel are invaluable as online learning requires technology to operate.  As Shamsy states, “The Internet and associated hardware and software components are the lifeblood of online learning and serve as the medium for content delivery and communication…in an online course or training program, [technical difficulties] can bring the presentation of information, as well as class interaction and collaboration, to a halt.”  In addition to support personnel, many institutions have created online tutorials for using the specific technology (such as software or a particular Web 2.0 technology) their learners will be using consistently or they provide links to the professionally developed support resourses offered by the makers of the software.

Online Instructional Designers:  These professionals create and design online instruction.  According to a job announcement from Iris Educational Media for an Instructional Designer/E-learning Specialist (2016), they often work with other professionals who have been tasked with designing a course such as content area specialist and media production teams and must have strong knowledge of educational technology such as Sharable Content Object Reference Model or SCORM, which, according to SCORM (2008), is a set of standards that ensures all online learning modules and management systems work with each other.  Chapman and Cantrel (2016) explain that instructional designers base their design on current theory and research so the student will experience better learning.

The above referenced support personnel provide a strong foundation for online educators and learners.  It is critical that their services are available in order to ensure that online learning can be the best that it can be.  According to Zawacki-Richter (n.d), online education is innovative when the technologies are used to explore, communicate, and inform instead of just transmit information.  He explains that because of the rapidly changing technology and the availability of online learning, students have become lifelong learners.  These two components, the continuing advancement of technology coupled with more and more students that life-long learning produces demand support.

References

Chapman, S., & Cantrell, P. (2016). What is an Instructional Designer? Retrieved August 12, 2016, from http://teaching.colostate.edu/tips/tip.cfm?tipid=70

Instructional Designer/E-learning Specialist. (2016, August). Retrieved August 12, 2016, from https://www.irised.com/pages/instructional-designer-e-learning-specialist

Online Distance Education [PDF]. Oldenburg, Germany: Carl von Ossietsky University

SCORM Explained. (2008). Retrieved August 12, 2016, from http://scorm.com/scorm-explained/

Shamsy, J. (2014, May). Elearn Magazine: A Balancing Act Part I: Technical Support and the Online Instructor. Retrieved August 11, 2016, from http://elearnmag.acm.org/archive.cfm?aid=2627756#1

Zawacki-Richter, O. (n.d.). The Growing Importance of Support for Learners and Faculty in