Year-Round Education Requires Year-Round IT Support

Designing Around the Student Experience

At Southern New Hampshire University's asynchronous online learning program, which has enrolled more than 200,000 students from across the U.S. and around the world, “the support model is designed around the student experience, not around a traditional campus schedule,” says Brad Hachez, assistant vice president of IT service desk and support operations at SNHU.

Real-time phone and chat support for SNHU's online students is available from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time every day, including evenings, weekends, holidays and other high-demand periods. 

To determine appropriate staffing levels, Hachez and his team rely heavily on historical volume data, contact patterns, enrollment trends, academic calendars and service-level performance metrics. Demand spikes are created by term starts, enrollment periods, finals and major academic events, “so we adjust staffing and scheduling to ensure we can maintain service levels during those critical times. Maintaining an accurate forecast from historical data is key,” he says.

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At the fully online Western Governors University, there's no traditional academic calendar, and courses start every month. With about 195,000 students currently enrolled nationwide, the WGU student portal handles 137,000 unique users per day. “Students are working at all hours around jobs and families, so our technology must be available 24/7. We focus on making sure the systems those tools run on are always up and running; including, for example, when a student is awake at 2 a.m. finishing an assignment,” says John Morton, vice president of IT infrastructure and security at WGU.

Balancing Self-Service Support, Chatbots and Human Agents

SNHU has invested significantly in knowledge management and self-service support resources powered by its IT service management tool to help students resolve common issues — password resets, account access guidance, multifactor authentication (MFA) questions, learning management system (LMS) navigation, software instructions — without needing to contact an agent. This allows the staff to focus on more complex issues, says Hachez.

WGU's IT team runs the infrastructure, network and core platforms around the clock, with formal monitoring and on-call coverage. Student-facing support channels — chat, phone, self-service resources — are staffed on extended hours. But WGU is also piloting artificial intelligence–driven virtual agents as part of the school's contact center platform, so students can get help outside of staffed IT service desk hours, with built-in escalation to a live person for anything the virtual agents can't fully resolve. The student services organization also runs a parallel AI-driven support layer to resolve student questions.

“These tools are strongest against high-volume, repeatable requests: account access and status, routine deadline and administrative requests,” Morton says. “Where they still fall short is anything that needs real judgment, an unusual account situation or genuine academic or personal support, and that's by design. We want those conversations to reach a human.”

For both universities, the most common after-hours issues involve password and account access, LMS access, MFA challenges or problems with email and connectivity. 

“The highest priority cases are those that prevent students from accessing our LMS, submitting assignments, taking exams, participating in coursework or accessing required academic resources, as those directly impact their ability to engage in learning,” Hachez says.

Outsourcing can sometimes be helpful in these cases. While SNHU generally retains ownership of strategy, service management, governance, complex escalation paths and the overall student experience, the IT team does leverage managed service partners to provide scalable frontline coverage. 

“External providers help us extend support hours, handle volume fluctuations and improve operational resilience, while internal teams remain accountable for service quality, continuous improvement and alignment with institutional priorities,” says Hachez.

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At WGU, critical technology and security functions are kept under direct internal ownership, “because the cost of getting those wrong is enterprisewide,” Morton says. “Where a managed provider can deliver more reliable, cost-effective coverage on a well-defined function — proctored exams, for example — we'll use one. We set the standards those providers operate against, and we own the outcome either way. It's less about insourcing versus outsourcing and more about keeping the guardrails and accountability centralized while letting the right partner run the parts they do best.”

Evaluating Support Performance and Managing Costs

At SNHU, Hachez and his team evaluate tech support performance through operational and experience-based metrics, including response times, service-level attainment, resolution rates, first-contact resolution, ticket quality and customer satisfaction scores. These are analyzed in combination with broader student success indicators and in partnership with other university teams.

To assess the impact of IT support on the student experience at WGU, Morton and his team track metrics across platform availability, response time, page load times and real user experience data, including a composite Application Performance Index (Apdex) score for each session. WGU also tracks incident volume and severity and how fast issues are resolved.

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“We push hard to improve these metrics year over year,” says Morton. On the support side, WGU's student services team tracks first-contact resolution and satisfaction scores, along with standard contact center metrics related to customer service.

For WGU, the challenge is that “there's no natural quiet window to schedule maintenance or let a team recover, and every hour is peak study time for someone — that drives real costs,” which includes on-call staffing, 24/7 network operations center monitoring, redesigning applications for zero-downtime deployments and ongoing investment in automation. Beyond direct financial costs, coordination presents an operational challenge. Getting on-call ownership and escalation right across a large, multiteam organization takes constant, deliberate governance, adds Morton.

And at SNHU, Hachez finds that the challenge comes from staffing for variable demand, maintaining consistent service quality across all hours, ensuring adequate training and knowledge management and balancing cost with responsiveness. 

“Because learner activity does not stop at the end of the business day, institutions must invest in workforce management, technology platforms, escalation processes and support models that can scale during peak academic periods. My advice would be to design support around student behavior rather than institutional working hours. Invest early in self-service capabilities, knowledge management, AI-assisted support and data-driven staffing models while treating IT support as a learner success function rather than simply a technical operation,” says Hachez.

Morton agrees and recommends that institutions should look at usage data “before you touch your staffing model. The moment you plot login and contact volume by hour, a 9-to-5 support plan stops making sense on its own terms.”