As technology advances, so do faculty needs, and support teams are often expected to keep pace with limited staff and expanding responsibilities. Recent findings from the CHLOE 10 report highlight that many institutions continue to operate online learning units with lean staffing models, even as support expectations and online enrollments rise (Simunich et al., 2025, pp. 6–7, 12). Building sustainable efficiencies into everyday processes is increasingly essential for maintaining quality support.
AI solutions are promising, but even if you have the resources for creating an advanced chatbot or integrating agentic workflows into your processes to speed resolutions, you may not have the expertise or bandwidth to stress-test those solutions for accuracy or resilience. This piece offers quality and efficiency recommendations that small teams can leverage at three stages of the faculty support lifecycle.
Laying the Foundation
- Establish clear procedures that outline timeline, scope, and expected response windows (days/times) for requests you receive. This will keep items moving and will also decrease repeat emails from faculty who reach out multiple times, wondering when they can expect to hear back from you.
- Create a content hub (a document, website, or shared folder) for asynchronous support resources. This space can be public or behind an institutional login, but it should be readily available to your users. The goal is to make referencing this resource easier than contacting you; it should be the first stop when users have a question or issue.
- If you already have a resource hub, consider ways you can leverage this resource more often or make it more prominent. One effective strategy is to point faculty to this hub consistently (via a standard email communication or a link in your learning management system (LMS) or email signature), and routinely refresh it with relevant content.
- Set up an autoresponder or create a quick copy-and-paste template to respond to new request emails. These responses could include a thanks for reaching out, an estimate for when they can expect a response, and a link to your content hub in case they’d like to see if their question is already answered there.
- Host live sessions on recurring "top issues.” You likely already have a sense of which questions you tend to answer repeatedly; take a moment at the beginning of the term or the next slow period to explore them with a group of attendees. These sessions often illuminate issues faculty didn’t realize they were encountering and can help you anticipate common needs for the term. Record your sessions or share summaries for asynchronous access. You may even want to pull clips of these recordings that can serve as walkthroughs for common issues, such as extending an assignment for a student or accessing and interpreting LMS analytics.
Resolving Issues and Answering Questions
- Explore AI tools to generate consistent email responses (but remember to always verify the content before sending). You may not have confidence in handing a chatbot directly to your constituents, but creating a GPT with a knowledge base you can use to draft initial versions of responses to common questions can save you time, especially with standard inquiries.
- Streamline email text by referencing other resources in favor of retyping solutions or recreating walkthroughs for each issue. When possible, point faculty to your central hub or an LMS/third-party tool guide in your response. In addition to the time saved in your answer, it may also lead them to explore other material hosted within that resource, saving future questions.
- Respond with the appropriate level of depth and breadth for each inquiry. Let’s say a faculty member writes in asking a question about assigning students to groups in the LMS. Do they need a robust answer, incorporating a “why” and a “how” as well as a “what could happen if”? Do they just need basic details or a link to a published guide? Does the ideal answer blend both approaches, with some details stressed and others omitted? Context clues and, potentially, historical precedent can point to the correct answer. Despite the extra moment it may take to consider, leveling responses creates powerful efficiencies. Some faculty members may find extensive detail burdensome; others prefer a full understanding of the rationale and steps involved. If you are able to determine the right balance in your first response, you can minimize unnecessary clarifications and additional questions.
- Consider whether and at what point issue resolution would be more efficient in a different format. Although asynchronous support provides flexibility and a record of the solution, some problems are simply easier to resolve if you and the user are both seeing the same thing at the same time via a video call or in-person conversation. If a question requires visual troubleshooting or if multiple back-and-forth messages are accumulating, shifting to a synchronous conversation can often resolve the issue more efficiently.
Iterating and Improving
- Categorize issues and log resolutions. We frequently receive questions about the same topics repeatedly. Leveraging information on how we resolved that issue last month, last term, or last year can allow us to answer a similar email more efficiently or create a resource that will help alleviate the issue in the future. Implement a ticketing system, an email tagging and folder management procedure, or a simple database of issues and resolutions to track vital data.
- Save commonly used guides and answers in an organized location. You can then repurpose via copy/paste or use templates for consistency, while still being able to modify details as needed before sending.
- Create resources on the common topics for your content hub. One memorable strategy we’ve seen recently was by a small team at Laramie County Community College, who created funny “techfomercials” to highlight common questions and useful features in the LMS (Sigsbury & Thein, 2025). The clearer and more compelling these resources are, the less often you’ll need to answer the same question again.
- Consider opt-in mailing lists or communities for updates. Inform faculty when you’ve published new content or are hosting a webinar, to increase the odds that they’ll use the information when it’s needed.
Implementing efficiencies doesn’t have to be complicated or result in a reduction of support levels; in many cases, it can actually improve the support offered and help faculty be more confident and independent with their technology. For small faculty support and technology teams, just a little change can go a long way. Clear processes and thoughtfully designed resources enable small teams to provide consistent, high-quality support at scale.
References
Sigsbury, L., & Thein, J. (2025, July 22–24). Techfomercials: A fun way to spotlight Canvas gems [Conference session]. InstructureCon 2025, Spokane, WA, United States.
Simunich, B., Garrett, R., Fredericksen, E. E., & Gay, K. (2025). CHLOE 10 | Meeting the moment: Navigating growth, competition, and AI in online higher education, 2025. Quality Matters.