Building Campus Tech Support: Fill & Download for Free

Well, I’m one of the professors who just got the order to do this, and I’m on an actual campus in a state where the governor just declared a health emergency. COVID-19 is now popping up all over the place. We have suspended classes from March 16 until March 30 (which includes our normal Spring Break), and we’ll restart our classes online at that time.I have always made intensive use of course management systems for putting up my syllabi, readings, PowerPoint slides, etc., and for giving exams and receiving and grading papers. So, going over to an online format doesn’t seem daunting to me. For many of my colleagues, however, who only use the course management system for posting syllabi and grading, it’s going to be a struggle. Many of them are not as technologically literate as professors these days really ought to be.The biggest challenge that I am perceiving as I think about what I’m going to do is that with 95% of our students moving back home, there will probably be all sorts of issues at the “receiving end” of the class. I’ve heard faculty talk about various fancy apps and gizmos, but the bottom line is that students may face the following challenges, some of them well-known to those of us who do part of our work from home:They may have a poor internet connection at home, unlike the high-speed connections available on campus.Many of them will have to share computers with the rest of the family.Many of them will be accessing course materials with tablets, phones, etc., so that elaborate PowerPoints, etc., will be hard for them to see or use. They’ll also be using probably limited data plans unless they have in-house wifi installed, so you don’t want to be sending out 12MB illustrated files.When you work from home everyone around you assumes you’re not really working, and that they can make demands on your time, etc., and interrupt you.Students’ daily schedules will be radically disrupted as home life takes over school life, especially if a family member is ill, or if parents have to leave younger kids in their care because the K-12 schools have closed. This makes the plans some faculty have about continuing synchronous meetings a bit unrealistic.Without the disciplinary structures of a university, friends to go to class with, support networks, etc., many students may fall behind or lose their motivation.It’s one thing to have a dedicated online course, where you can make sure students have desktops or laptops, at home, proper high speed Internet connections, etc., and that they know how to use the various platforms and apps required. This is a very different kind of situation. As a result, professors need to think about making their new course design simple and practical. It’s going to have to be rugged to survive this without falling apart.Unfortunately, many faculty seem to be thinking that they need to find online analogs for every aspect of their courses. Like discussions, for instance. Why not, instead, take this opportunity to reintroduce our intellectually incurious new generation to the rigor, pleasure, and thought-stimulation provided by actual reading? Why get group chats and web cams involved, making anyone who doesn’t have one feel left out? Many people are making assumptions about how much technology students actually have. They probably have a lot, but it wasn’t selected with academic activities in mind.People need to figure out what the most essential elements of their courses are and focus on how to deliver that as easily and succinctly as they can. The same reverse-engineering that should be applied to a face-to-face course syllabus is needed here, too, but your end goals have to be realistic ones. Not everything that happens in the classroom can happen online - there’s an alchemistic spontaneity that you get in the classroom that just doesn’t exist online.Today’s students, contrary to popular opinion, are not very tech savvy at all, despite their fixation with their phones, and they can’t expect much tech support during this crisis. Our IT department already has stopped loaning laptops, and has ceased all in-person visits. Handheld devices, furthermore, usually are not eligible for on-campus tech support. They’ll have to handle their own outages and glitches.As for the actual decision to close campuses and go online, that was a sound decision. The closure of large, public institutions helps to slow down the transmission of viruses like COVID-19 so that we can hopefully avoid the spike in cases that has just overwhelmed the hospitals in Italy. Studies of closures during the 1918–1919 Spanish Flu pandemic show that early school closures reduced mortality rates by up to half compared with cities that did not order such closures until it was too late.The people who say this is an “overreaction” haven’t done their homework, and they don’t know what they’re talking about. Because of the number and distribution of cases, we now know that COVID-19 is spreading “in the community,” which is why it has been reclassified as a pandemic. When it’s just travelers here and there, that’s a different matter. But this is half of the school soccer team, just returning from an away game, or the teacher’s aid at your daughter’s preschool, or the pastor who just got back from the infected nursing home, shaking hands with everyone after church on Sunday. Or the gas pump handle at your local gas station.True, college students aren’t as “at-risk” for death, but they are excellent vectors for disease. You should see how fast the flu usually rips through densely-packed dorms during midterms (which we were just about to have). College students are not like the general population: they get no sleep, work or study (or play) round-the-clock, and come into close contact with hundreds of other people every day in their classes, at meals, or just walking around campus. Imagine 4,000 people a day using a building, and all passing in and out of the same door, using the same mechanism to open the door. And have you seen the inside of the typical college dorm room? People in prison have more personal space. One professor once said to me, “I had more bunk space in the Navy!” So, you can imagine what the dorms are like when everyone is getting sick.Universities have been through plagues and pestilence before - they’ve dealt with wars and invasions, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and so forth. The faculty can do this, but we need to be given the maximum amount of flexibility. This is actually the part I fear the most after seeing the kinds of “policies” HR departments have trotted out for dealing with this crisis.

You will smell the currency and may get less focussed at a studies or campus prep.You will be loose track of your career building in the industry and might get stuck / addicted to BPO lifestyle.

By definition of Engineering, it includes all phases of product life-cycle: Research, Development, Testing, Implementation, Administration & Maintenance.IT Infrastructure outsourcing means a foreign client has outsourced the technical management of its infrastructure (Data-center, Server farms, Networks, Data Storage equipment, etc) in the form of a project containing the respective sub-teams for technical domains.Hence as for the Technical Support is concerned, there is ground to sky difference b/w supporting laptop/desktop (consumer tech) & server/network/storage/db (corporate level tech). The later requires good understanding of basic concepts of computer & electronics technology, while the former doesn’t.Higher levels of tech support job (L2 & beyond) in any domain may require employee to be certified like CCIE, RHCE, MCSE, OCP, etc, or at least have that corresponding knowledge. That means a specialized professional with strong analytical skills.As of Jan 2017, in regular institutes (not OEM partners) of Pune & Bengaluru, CCNA course can cost 8k–10k INR, VMware VCP6-DCV can cost 15k–20k INR, RHCSA+RHCE can cost 15k-20K INR, MCSA again 15k-20k INR. Higher level courses like CCNP can cost from 30k-50k INR depending upon track; & CCIE can cost 70k to 180k INR again depending upon track. With this kind of investment & skill set achieved at proper time, you can grow & earn very well which you can check on websites like Glassdoor, Payscale, etc. However, remember that your salary also depends on how practically you negotiate in HR round of interview otherwise you will end up like a big fish caught in the net when expectation was only of small fishes. ;-) Whether it is vegetable or human resources, every person or company wants best one with least money spent. Very few companies really demonstrate ethics in proactively treating their employees well, most just talk. Job satisfaction = function (respect, revenue, resources, work-life balance). Beautiful building, campus, interior design affect us only in our 20s & early 30s.I would like to mention some points here which the MNCs take advantage in India to minimize the resources’ CTC:-India is a highly populous country. So in order to keep its economy stable, it is necessary to absorb the Tsunami of college passouts every year. So lots of options to select/reject in least possible salary.We don’t have globally competing & dominating MNCs yet for chip (Intel, AMD), OS (IBM, MS, Apple), Servers ( HP, DELL), Storage (EMC, NetApp, HDS), DB (IBM, Oracle), Networking (Cisco, Juniper) & so on.S/w development tools like Visual Basic made Object Oriented Programming a game. You type ‘.’ after an Object & all its Events, Properties & Actions got listed in a scrollable context menu. Learning Java, .NET, etc is not rocket science, at least not for students passing out of good schools. But quality education comes with a price too.Looking at good school’s computer education curriculum since 1990s, basic computer programming started from class 5. So by class 10, students will have 6 years of thorough practice drastically developing their imagination power & creativity to write beginner level codes. What they chose after Board exam would be irrelevant for 1st 2 years of coding experience.With part-time & distance learning courses & certifications, the competition in market increases further because they allow people to change their career/domain in 1st few years of employment. But people may have to compromise on their salary.So in India, most development business is also outsourced. But that doesn’t mean we should call it S/w BPO.But everybody knows now how much real engineering is used in 1st few years of coding for regular passouts (excluding IITians, NITians & other top most academic performers).So when both development & other jobs are outsourced, they will require IP phones, video-conferencing & screen-sharing for doing work with the foreign clients. In development, the Leads & managers do most of client communication & coders just have deadline to finish the module. So they will have benefit of general shift & weekend holiday by default but if they delay in finishing the module, they will also have to extend daily &/or on weekend. In corporate level tech support & system admin jobs, the TSE or Admin has to communicate with people on other side who are also engineers & admins & not regular common citizens. So just like 24x7 running facilities like electricity, communications, telephony, etc (prevalent before IT boom), today’s digital infrastructure like internet, OLTP, E-commerce, cable-TV, ATMs, networks, data-centers, server farms, etc, etc, all require 24x7 monitoring, support & troubleshooting. Hence the shift system. But remember the points mentioned above.Conclusions: 1st 2–3 years of IT industry in India is very easy to manage. Challenge will come after that, whether it is development or some other category of job as per product life cycle. So you need to have genuine & strong technical skills eventually no matter what you choose & keep improving & adapting with technological evolution. Career is a journey, not destination.