Our team primarily provides learning technology support by responding to help requests submitted through our ticketing system, TeamDynamix. The time required to respond to tickets can vary widely, from a few minutes to an hour depending on the complexity of the question, how much troubleshooting is involved, how much back and forth is required, and whether other colleagues need to be consulted.

Responsibility for responding to tickets is divided into shifts assigned to each LT&I team member. Due to staffing shortages, I was responsible for a disproportionate number of tickets between the period of July 2024 to March 2025. I was responsible for responding to tickets three full days per week, compared to one day assigned to each of the other Coordinators. During this period, I was assigned responsibility of approximately 606 tickets (I may be filtering this incorrectly). This number does not account for tickets that I commented on that were assigned to someone else, tickets that I reassigned to another responsibility party, or tickets that I helped consult with. Since March 2025, I no longer have assigned shifts to monitor tickets. This responsibility has now fallen to the Learning Technologist role full-time.

I understand that by the time students or faculty contact us they are likely quite frustrated with the issues they are experiencing. I strive to reply to tickets in a timely manner (usually within a couple of hours) and to provide thorough and effective support. My general approach is to communicate professionally, but also with a level of friendliness and approachability. I try to foster positive relationships and want our clients to feel like they are contacting supportive colleagues and are encouraged to come back to us the next time they need help.  

Rather than only trying to address specific technical issues, I try to keep good pedagogy in mind and make recommendations that can improve faculty workflow or the student experience, when appropriate. I try to take an educative approach when responding to tickets by providing context as to why something isn’t working, making sure they know how to fix it, recommending alternative solutions when necessary, making sure they know how to access resources and ways to contact us in the future, and updating our existing resources if gaps are identified.  

Annotated Tickets

The following ten examples of help desk transactions demonstrate differences in technologies assisted with, types of issues, degrees of depth, and need for follow up. The majority of examples are related to Moodle, as they were more prevalent and better exemplify the level of complexity we encounter during this time period. The support I provided for other platforms, such as WordPress or Slido, tended to be addressed through virtual meetings and thus did not have supporting evidence that could be included.

Short reflections have been included for each ticket. All links to tickets open in a new tab.

Link to ticket.

This was a ticket request from a faculty member who was confused regarding how final grades were displayed in their Moodle course. Instead of providing a quick fix for the problem, I provided context to help him understand why the gradebook looks the way it does. I updated his gradebook myself to ensure a quick resolution, but I made sure to provide simple and direct instructions so he would also know how to make these changes in the future. I had previously interacted with this instructor both through our ticketing system and through office hours, so I knew he was still new to TRU and to Moodle. I try to make sure all new faculty members feel supported and comfortable coming to us with questions. Although this was a relatively simple request, I think it is a good example of the importance being able to adapt our instructions and language depending on the experience level of the user.

Link to ticket.

The issue described in this ticket arose due to an assignment activity in Moodle being set up as a group assignment without groups being created in the Moodle participants list. When this occurs, Moodle will assign all students to a “default group,” and as soon as a submission is made, Moodle treats it as a submission on behalf of all students. This is problematic because it locks out further submissions and potentially exposes a student’s work to other students outside of their group.

Rather than jumping right to a technical solution, I first asked the instructor to confirm the intention behind the assignment – whether it was in fact a group assignment or an individual one. Once this was confirmed, I was able to propose a solution and provide detailed instructions for how they could implement it. I also anticipated that this change may affect their gradebook and provided instructions for if that was the case.

I offered to meet virtually to double check his changes and discuss further, but the changes had already been made and he was satisfied that I confirmed they were done correctly. Providing detailed written instructions will allow for the instructor to refer back to them if the problem occurs again in the future. I prefer to set a time to meet instructors virtually so we can screenshare to work through problems, but in hindsight it may have been more efficient to call them right away in this situation.

Link to ticket.

This instructor submitted a ticket because there was a significant discrepancy between what a student was seeing for their grade and what the instructor was seeing. I first did a quick scan of their gradebook to determine if anything obvious jumped out and then asked for the specific student details so I could take a closer look. After confirming that there was a discrepancy between what the student and instructor were seeing, I determined that it was due to a grade override being mistakenly entered in a category total column. This prevented Moodle from calculating the category appropriately. I provided detailed instructions for how to fix the issue and made sure the instructor knew how to identify it again in the future, as well as how they could view the gradebook from the student’s point of view to further diagnose problems. The instructor expressed confusion at how the override could have been entered, so I reassured them that it is a common mistake that can easily be made.

Link to ticket.

This is a relatively complex gradebook inquiry that involved two groups completing distinct activities within the same Moodle course. The first issue had to with displaying accurate final grades for students, and the second had to do with displaying completion progress accurately. I was able to address the first issue in a satisfactory way and provide an alternative suggestion for the second that was adopted. I have worked with this client extensively and knew that he had relatively high technical skills, so I was able to propose a somewhat complex solution (creating two Moodle Completion Progress blocks) without needing to go into great detail.

Link to ticket.

This ticket is a rare case in which I directly built a relatively complex quiz for an instructor based on questions provided in a Word document. Our team would normally do this type of hands-on work. This level of service is a continuation from when the Faculty of Nursing funded a dedicated position on the LT&I team to help with building their courses in Moodle. Although this position is no longer being funded, we still occasionally help with this type of request when time permits. I was not the project lead on this initiative, so unfortunately have not been involved in determining a sustainable plan moving forward.

I have included this ticket as an example because it was a relatively complex and time-consuming task. There is not a lot of back and forth with the instructors as they fortunately provided most of the information that I needed to build the quiz, including the open and close date, time limit, how the questions were to be randomized, and the review settings. I did, however, flag a potential marking issue with the randomized questions and also took the initiative to redesign a diagram of the brain to ensure the instructions were clear to students. This demonstrates how we try to anticipate potential problems for faculty when marking and try to keep the experience of students in mind when developing in Moodle.

Link to ticket.

This instructor submitted a ticket to our help desk because students were finding that they were unable to copy and paste from a Moodle quiz to an Excel file, but the instructor was able to do so when previewing the quiz. This required some testing on my end to determine why the quiz was behaving differently for students and the instructor, and I was able to determine that it was due to a security setting that had been enabled in the quiz settings that only affected the student role while attempting the quiz. After describing the problem to the instructor, this then led to further discussion surrounding academic integrity since they were concerned that disabling the security feature would make it easier for students to access Copilot. I explained the pros and cons of each option and directed them to IT Services to explore further monitoring software that is available in the computer labs since Moodle is limited in this capacity.

Link to ticket.

This ticket was submitted by a concerned instructor who noticed some discrepancies in a student’s IP address while writing an in-class exam in Moodle. I try to treat these types of inquiries delicately so as not to make unfounded accusations of academic misconduct. I treat my role as helping instructors interpret the course logs and flagging odd occurrences so that they then have the knowledge to determine how to best proceed. I think in this case I was a little too quick to redirect to IT Services for further help with identifying the IP address. In hindsight, I should have looped in IT myself and worked with them to provide more information to the instructor.

Link to ticket.

In this ticket, an instructor who relies extensively on the BigBlueButton activity in Moodle to broadcast lectures and store recordings reached out because the server was not reachable. I reached out to our System Administrator who was able to identify and rectify the issue; however, some of the instructor’s recordings were not recovered. After our System Administrator could not determine why this was the case, I took the initiative to find the recordings on our Moodle Sandbox server and manually copied over each one for the instructor. Luckily, this issue did not arise for anyone else at the time so I was able to manually intervene to help this instructor, otherwise we would have had to do a deeper dive to find the underlying issue. Still, I think this is a good example of how our team routinely has to work with other groups to identify the problem, and how we try to go above and beyond to make sure the client and their students are happy.

Link to ticket.

This request was a somewhat complex and time-sensitive case that involved a change of instructors in Moodle. Normally, instructors would be changed in Banner and the change would automatically take place in Moodle, but in this case the instructor needed urgent access to the course for class on the same day. I proposed a couple solutions to determine what the new instructor was comfortable with, and together we decided I would manually create a new course shell for the instructor to then manually enrol students. I further recommended hiding the old course shell until changes in Banner caught up to ensure that students did not get confused seeing two courses in their Moodle dashboard. I think this is a good example of how our team tries to keep the student experience in mind and are happy and willing to take extra steps to ensure that instructors feel well supported and students have a positive experience.

Link to ticket.

This ticket was submitted to our team by an OLFM who had been directed to us by the OL Production team. I could tell he was frustrated, claiming that he was an experienced Moodle user. Taking this into account, I wanted to make sure I didn’t come across as condescending, even though I suspected it would be an easy fix.

This case is an example of how the phrasing of a question may not accurately reflect what the real issue is, and the importance of asking for clarification to determine the root cause of the problem. I suspected that the few issues he described stemmed from inexperience with how OL courses are uniquely set up. Once I determined it was an issue with his workflow and a misunderstanding with how certain parts of the course were set up, I was able to provide recommendations to adjust his workflow and provide context as to why his approach wasn’t working and why the course was set up the way that it was. I think it’s safe to say he had a positive experience, and I would like to highlight for the purpose of this performance review that I was referred to as a “steely eye missile man.”