SOU FAQ

Team Name: Efficient Sharing of Information with Students

Team Lead: Jeffrey Gayton

Team Members: Julie Anderson, Allyson Beck, Brad Chris (past member), Kerry Day, Bri Mitchell (student) Donny Nickelson, Ellen Siem, Craig Stillwell

The SOU FAQ initiative emerged from an RFY team looking to provide accurate information to first-year students at the time of need. The team identified the “firehose of information” that students receive as major barrier to their success. Students receive too much information, often when they don’t need it (e.g., at recruitment events, at orientation, through campus-wide email). When they actually need a piece of information, they can’t remember they were once told about it and don’t know where to look for it.

The team initially identified all the sources, types, and routes of information for students, hoping to find ways to stem the tide. It quickly became apparent that student information flow was a problem that went well beyond first-year students, so the team focused on helping students easily find accurate answers to their questions. The team noticed that many areas of campus, both academic and support, rely on local FAQs. The problem is that if students don’t know what FAQ has the information they need, they won’t be of much use. In addition, existing FAQs on campus are static, not allowing students to ask questions.

The team therefore developed an SOU FAQ as a central, comprehensive, and authoritative source of information for students. A free, open-source platform with the ability to meet web-accessibility requirements called phpMyFAQ was identified and populated with a representative set of FAQs from all areas of campus. Individual questions were organized into subject headings as well as tagged.

A unified, campus-wide FAQ would provide first-year students with a one stop shop to find the information they need. For first-generation and under-represented students who don’t necessarily know what kinds of services and information the Bursar or Registrar provide, not having to navigate the byzantine systems of higher education to get an answer to their question will be a tremendous service. FAQs are not just used by external audiences, but internally as well, so an SOU FAQ will also help faculty and staff quickly provide accurate information to students.

An important aspect of the SOU FAQ is to avoid duplicating information that exists elsewhere, particularly on the SOU website. Duplicating information increases the workload for faculty and staff, and creates opportunities for conflicting information, which negatively impacts students. Information on the SOU FAQ will therefore link to existing information as often as possible. In addition, FAQs can be split by topic, so if a department wants have its FAQ information on its local website, it can do so without having to contribute to two FAQs – one for itself and another for campus.

Though the technology platform is free, faculty and staff will need to support the FAQ. Incorporation of already-existing FAQs into an SOU FAQ can be done by RFY team members, but answering questions students post to the FAQ in a timely manner, and identifying and incorporating other important information into the SOU FAQ will require faculty and/or staff time.

Click here to see the test SOU FAQ, with all existing FAQs housed on the SOU website in one, centralized repository.