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About Tim Calhoon
Tim Calhoon is the Director of the California Community Colleges Technology Center at Butte College, which helps facilitate and coordinate the work of California Community Colleges (CCC) systemwide technology projects in coordination with the CCC Chancellor's Office Telecommunications & Technology Unit. Prior to this, Tim accrued more than 10 years experience in managing educational technology organizations for PLATO Learning (Nasdaq:TUTR) and CyberEd, Inc. This work, in conjunction with a talented development team, lead to more than 17 educational technology awards and a Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODIE nomination. Tim lives in Northern California near Chico with his wife, son and daughter. His children are both currently attending college.
TechEDge eNews Update
Tech>ology: Get Satisfaction For Our Students?
Last Updated on Thursday, 24 March 2011 Written by Tim Calhoon Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Recently I reviewed the community-based social media support platform, Get Satisfaction, which turns traditional support on its head by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd.
From their website they explain how they focus conversations around four simple, outcome-oriented topic types:
Ask a Question: Quickly connect students/staff with each other, the college, and with the answers they seek. Colleges and students working together create a real-time, social knowledgebase that significantly reduces repetitive support requests and increases student satisfaction.
Share an Idea: More than a simple suggestion box or voting app, Get Satisfaction acts as a Focus Group 2.0 in that it aggregates feedback in a way that encourages conversation among students.
Report a Problem: Something isn’t working properly? This topic type allows students/staff to quickly search the community for solutions, and also gives the college real-time insight into potential issues and defects.
Praise: You love your students/staff. Why not give them a place to love you back?
Source: www.getsatisfaction.com (Note: I modified this text a bit to relate to students/staff and colleges instead of customers and companies, but the idea is the same.)
Check out IT @ Biola University as an example of how Get Satisfaction is being used for student support. Ask it a student service related question (financial aid, registration). Note how staff monitors the community and provides authoritative answers.
Screenshot of IT @ Biola University website 
using Get Satisfaction.
Get Satisfaction seems a natural environment for student support as there is direct link for Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter.
Also Get Satisfaction helps you monitor the mood of your users so that pain-point issues can get addressed quickly.
The feelings dialogue box from Get Satisfaction.
The philosophy behind our next generation of systemwide applications is openness (we’re considering “OpenCCC” as the umbrella for the CCC identity federation and systemwide applications). A product like Get Satisfaction appears to be a support solution that could tie right in. We plan to investigate other similar products and may deploy a community-based social media support platform for OpenCCCApply, the new Web 2.0 application to college, currently under development.
Have you looked at something like this? Does this seem like a good thing to implement at your college?<>
For more information about Get Satisfaction: http://getsatisfaction.com/