Category: Fall 2024 Issue 2

By Anna Bentley and Brad Young 

At Oregon State, every unit has some kind of operations work. Many units have positions dedicated solely to operations or admin support work, while others tack on these tasks to other types of positions. Some of the work is easier to define, like scheduling, office management and/or customer service, purchasing and fiscal support, human resources support, and technology management/support. But much of our work is not easy to define. We tend to be the ones folks go to when there are random bits and bobs that just need to get done. The work is often invisible and unglamorous until it is needed–and then, it is often needed immediately.  

Operations work at Oregon State plays a crucial yet often invisible role in keeping our campus running smoothly. To make the most of this essential support, it helps to understand how best to work together. The following five recommendations offer practical ways to collaborate with operations staff, ensuring that both your needs and their expertise align for an efficient, effective campus experience. 

1. Give us the tea. Keep us up-to-date on what is going on with your program, events, or other efforts. Operations roles are often the connective tissue, the grout between the bricks. When we are in-the-know about what’s going on, we may be able to identify opportunities for greater efficiencies, align efforts, and avoid potential pitfalls. 

2. Ask if we’re the right person to do a thing. Operations and admin support roles across campus can be incredibly varied. Maybe you’ve worked with someone in a former unit who was responsible for scheduling, but someone with the same title in a different unit might be responsible for HR support tasks, purchasing and invoice processing, or customer service. Unless you’re certain it’s within our scope to do a certain task, it’s best to ask to make sure we’re the right person.  

3. No need to apologize when making an ask. We love to provide operational support! It means a lot to us when folks acknowledge our work, but you don’t need to apologize when you ask for something. It’s not an inconvenience; it’s our job! It brings us fulfillment to play a part in helping our colleagues achieve their objectives.  

4. Ask us about our processes, approaches, and timelines. We want folks to have realistic expectations for how long tasks will take. Some tasks are surprisingly quick, while other seemingly simple tasks can take a long time due to complex processes and workflows or technical limitations. We’re also typically balancing a lot of asks and interruptions at once. One way you can help us help you is by asking about our processes and timelines, giving us as much heads up as possible when you request something, and communicating how rigid or flexible your deadline is. 

5. When in doubt, follow up. We are happy to update you if you’re wondering about where things are in the process. We want to keep you informed, but sometimes we need to be prompted because we are juggling a lot in our brain. If you’re worried that something slipped through the cracks, don’t be shy to ask about it—we want to make sure everything is taken care of and keep you in the loop. 

As we begin our work implementing Prosperity Widely Shared and Thriving Together, many of our goals will require strong operations work across campus to achieve them. From making effective referrals for students, to holding knowledge of other services to avoid duplication of efforts, to facilitating communication within and across units, operations staff bridge the gap between otherwise siloed units. As we continue serving a high volume of students, we’ll need to get even better at this and improve operational efficiencies so we can help students get to the right place the first time and continue delivering high-quality services. By communicating regularly, understanding roles, respecting timelines, and following up as needed, you can help operations professionals provide the best support possible.  

If you work in operations or admin support, what did we miss? What would you add? Let us know in the comments below. 

by Sarah Norek

Back in September (2024), the websites for the Academic Success Center (ASC) and the Learning Corner (the ASC’s online academic support resource) migrated from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10.

For context: the ASC site shares ASC programs and services and how they can support students in their academic experience, progress and success at OSU. We also have information for partners, and broader academic support information for learning at OSU. Connected to the ASC site is the Learning Corner, the ASC’s online resource available whenever users have internet access. The Learning Corner is a collection of quick-to-read articles and interactive tools grounded in the science of learning and developed to help students learn how to learn. It’s a point of pride for the ASC that folks from across the country and around the world access the Learning Corner to support their learning or their students’ learning.

Leading up to the migration, we saw great opportunity in redesigning pages (and layout, structure, etc.) to improve the student-user experience. Below, you’ll find 5 considerations we made during the Learning Corner redesign specifically, and how we implemented them. We know this shift from D7 to D10 is happening across the university, and we hope that, in sharing about our process, we might offer ideas that resonate for or support others in a similar place.

1. Students consume information differently than before. This will almost always be the case. Our access to information, the channels through which we learn information, will continue to evolve. In our current context, we know folks use social media feeds for quick bursts of content, so we moved away from longer, scrollable articles to shorter content that could be quickly consumed. It’s not an Instagram reel (but we do have those to share Learning Corner content and if you don’t already you should follow us!), but it’s a bloggier style, we’re incorporating more images, and we’re focusing on sharing tangible tips that can be considered quickly.
2. Universal Design improves everyone’s experience. Sure, some folks will lean into a text-heavy webpage and be able to draw information from it, but it might not be a pleasant experience and, for a lot of users, it’s taxing.  We thought intentionally about how many characters we wanted in each line (ideally, 50-60), how many words we wanted on each page (between 300 and 700 is our goal), and how we could use white space, images, and bolded font to amplify messaging and create a better, more effective and efficient reading experience. We want users to arrive to pages and not feel overwhelmed by the content but like it’s a friendly, inviting space to learn.
3. Care matters. This wasn’t new information for us – we work hard to craft messaging and share content that’s student-centered and strengths based, and to do it in a tone that conveys care and relatability while also being reliable and informative. But the intersection of relatability and reliability can be challenging at times, when thinking about tone – we want to keep the research present and also be sure we deliver it in digestible ways. In our content, we’re writing to the student, we’re inviting the student to reflect, we’re acknowledging everyone’s going to approach things individually and what works for one person might not work for someone else. We’re conveying care through choices we offer as much as through tone we use.
4. There’s no one way to engage with and consume information. Some users will be happy to read through a Quick Read (or two or three) and get their information in that form. Others might prefer to download information (a Handout), saving it to their computer or printing it out. Others might choose to print out a Tool to write on, while still others might decide to use the Tool as a fillable PDF. Knowing information consumption isn’t a monolith, we drafted content and content-types (Quick Reads, Handouts, Tools) to offer options and meet users where they’re at in terms of preferences and capacity.
5. Guiding values and documents can inform and help us check our choices. The Office of Academic Support adopted Branding & Marketing Guidelines during the year that helped us ground our Learning Corner text and design choices. Having these, we could ask, Were we writing in the clearest way possible? Were we adhering to information hierarchy, with the most important information coming first? Did at least half of our images include people? Were we creating an intuitive tool? These questions reflect some of our values, and while each office’s values may differ, the exercise of checking against them can help to create a cohesive user experience.

We know these aren’t all the considerations to make, or what every office will consider for a shift to Drupal 10, but maybe there’s something here to support you in your Drupal 10 adventure, if you’re still on it. Drupal 10 can be challenging (so challenging!), and iteration takes time and capacity. Wherever you’re at and whatever you’re choosing, we’re cheering for you and, if you’ve got questions or want to talk about your process, or if you visit the Learning Corner and wonder how something you encounter relates back to these considerations or others, please be in touch!

by Chris Ervin

Many units across the university employ student staff, and it’s not unusual for unit managers to share supervisory responsibilities. Collaborative supervision of student staff has the potential to create beneficial redundancies in mentoring and support, and some units like the Writing Center, the Academic Success Center, Supplemental Instruction, and the Basic Needs Center have thoughtfully and intentionally created structures that support student employees’ professional growth and create clear supervisory roles. I was curious about how each program manages shared supervision and what values serve as foundations for their supervision and support of their student staff. For this issue of The Success Kitchen, I share what I learned about Supplemental Instruction’s supervisory team. 

Program: Supplemental Instruction 

Program Leads: Adam Lenz and William McDonald-Newman 

Values: Equity, Efficiency, and Flexibility 

In Supplemental Instruction, the shared supervision model is based on a division of labor that puts the student employee’s experience at the center of focus. William and Adam have made decisions about their respective responsibilities based on their own strengths and interests, while guarding against creating confusion for their staff. For example, William and Adam both contribute to hiring decisions and monitor the team through observations. While Adam approves timesheets, he corroborates with William to ensure accurate reporting. This is because William maintains an office in the BRC adjacent to most study tables and leads the day-to-day operations, scheduling, and facilitating team meetings so he has a more grounded view on the program. William has also taken lead on the SI’s new mentor program, supporting the design and implementation in collaboration with veteran SI Leaders.   

Adam, on the other hand, focuses on pedagogical design and assessment. His day-to-day work contributes to building, updating, and maintaining SI’s assessment protocols; managing SI’s registration management software (Ideal-Logic); and looking at the numerous program artifacts that the team produces in order to determine how to improve future team meetings or initial training by adding new topics or inviting new units. It is Adam’s job to be in touch with colleges, administrators, and space partners when it comes to building or maintaining collaborations necessary for SI to happen successfully, and for sharing relevant data about the program that demonstrates SI’s successes, needs, and pinch points. In sum, Adam’s share of SI’s collaborative supervision involves seeing SI and its staff at the program/big picture level.  

An example of how SI’s supervisory model has been successful is the recent development of a mentor program. William brainstormed and piloted SI’s mentor program with Adam’s support and co-facilitation. Experienced SI leaders (SILs) are now taking more agency in planning and leading team meetings as well as serving as additional forms of check-in support for newly hired SILs. This effect has seen an increase in cross-team communication and reduced confusions during onboarding substantially.  

To close this spotlight on SI, I offer this visual representation of the SI shared supervision model, which I believe represents a structure for supervising student employees that works well for a program with one Coordinator and one Assistant Coordinator: