Scaling Ans within your institution

This article provides several tips for scaling Ans within your institution. Please note, this article is only applicable for institutions who are already using Ans and want to increase their usage.

Administrators

We recommend setting up a structure for administering and managing Ans. Most of our users choose to have an administrator or a team of administrators in Ans, depending on the size of the institution. We often see that administrators have control and authority over multiple applications within the institution, of which Ans is one. For Ans specifically, we see that administrators are responsible for (this can differ per institution):

• Making sure that every person in the Ans platform has the right role and permissions. Administrators have the highest role in Ans. This means that administrators can add new employees and students, manage the settings on institution level, and manage question banks and courses of the entire institution.
• Configuring the platform based on the wishes and demands of users. Administrators also need to take the policies and processes of the institution into account. They are responsible for setting up the platform with the preferred settings. For example: managing the default settings, setting up departments, configuring integrations and managing beta features.
• Trying and testing new functionalities before enabling them in the production environment.
• Acting as the main point of contact for the Ans support team. Our support team will send out release notes via email to all administrators. The administrators read the updates and perform actions if required.
• After the implementation is complete, the Customer Success Manager of Ans has close contact with the administrators of the institution during operational meetings.

Another term that is being used for this role is Business Information Manager (BiM). More information about the responsibilities of this role can be found online by searching for ‘Business Information Service Library (BiSL)’.

Support

Some institutions have a first-line support team ready within the institution. This is mostly applicable for bigger institutions. The first-line support team will answer the questions of users before contacting the Ans support team. Any questions they cannot answer, will be sent to Ans support by the institutions’ support team. For some institutions, this is preferred to keep track of the questions that are being asked and to advise on institution specific use cases and policies.

Next to the support team of the institutions, some institutions decide to create their own support articles based on their way of working. Think about decisions that are being made on working with question banks, how users should login, creating formative assessments etc.

Integrations

If integrations are not yet set up during the pilot period, we recommend doing that as soon as possible. Think about integrations with proctoring software, text-to-speech software and lockdown browser software. It can also be beneficial to connect Ans to your Learning Management System through LTI. More information about the possibilities can be found here.

Migration

It is important to assist new users with the migration of their questions. We recommend setting up a clear structure on how to use the question banks, for example: per department, per study or per course. Once that is set, there can be made agreements on importing the questions in the question bank. We recommend doing this by a central department, for example by the project team and administrators.

It might not be sufficient that instructors (or other end-users) will import questions themselves. We recommend writing documentation about this process based on the guidelines of the institution to prevent end-users from doing this by themselves. More information about importing exercises can be found here.

Training

It is important to think about training new users in order for them to get familiar with the use of Ans. They can be trained by the key-users or administrators of the institution. In case more support is needed, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager. Ans can assist in setting up and organising additional training sessions* for new users.
*Training sessions given by Ans come with additional costs.

Adoption

Successful adoption of Ans lies largely with the instructors. It is very important that the instructors can work well with the platform as they are the end-users. To give the instructors a good start, we first make sure, together with the administrators and the project team, that the platform is set up correctly. We also recommend migrating their questions before the instructors are trained. This allows them to start working with their own data immediately.

We also often see key users being appointed and trained within institutions to support the instructors. They are usually also responsible for training instructors within their own department or faculty. Sometimes it can be beneficial for the adoption to organise key user meetings during the implementation. This way, the needs of instructors and key users can be identified by the administrators. These can then be taken to the project team meeting. Finally, we also regularly see communication advisers appointed to ensure that internal communication runs smoothly. They can inform employees on time about upcoming changes and expected activities.

Acceptance (optional)

The implementation of Ans is completed through formal acceptance. Here, the organisation accepts that the project team has delivered a successful implementation. The platform has been set up, the integrations are in place, the data has been migrated and all employees have been sufficiently trained. We will go into the operational phase where we make agreements on how often both project teams will meet.