By Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University

Walking fine lines

Fundamentals:  Offering neutral and comprehensive ETDR documentation

Early on, I realized that while there was a website with some ETDR documentation, much was missing.  I rewrote the help manual, the ETDR checklist, the FAQs, and other aspects of the site.  I added a section on auto-numbering an ETDR in Word.  I remade the templates for the reports, theses, and dissertations.  (Initially, the master’s reports and theses were treated of a piece instead of two separate files.)  Another team member provided some light editing oversight.  A series of videos were just finalized and published out to benefit students who prefer different modalities of learning.  These range from 1 - 11 minutes or so.  These are to further develop the site. 

Learning from each consultation case

Lesson #1:  Student (non)maintenance of computer systems

I learned that people do not often manage their computer systems well.  Many have malware riding in their systems. In one case, in the middle of a two-hour session, the student’s file locked up, and she could not get the file to accept any changes. She had a version of the file saved early on in our session as a version she could return to if anything happened during our session.  (That is a security approach that I take with all students.)  The file had never left her machine, fortunately for the health of my machine and for my reputation.  During this drama, I asked the student if I had edited her file at all.  She had to think a few minutes before she said no.  

 

Lesson #6:  Making their own rules (which is fine up to a point)  

Graduate students often put a lot of value to their ETDR masterpiece.  Many have spent years and a lot of money to study.  They are highly invested in the effort.  Their ETDR is an extension of them and their work.  For many, it is a core part of their identity. 

Many have a clear sense of what they want the ETDR to look like. They have preferences for font faces and font sizes, for their headings to their body text.  One recent graduate really wanted her figures to be the size of thumbnails.  Another had a table of images that she collected over the years.  Some prefer auto-numbering of each of the headings and subheadings.  In different fields, they have particular strictures for citations.  We accommodate where we can.  However, where these innovations become problematic is when the template is broken along the way.  

No thanks to “favors” (and no thanks to freelancing)

Sometimes, there are outsized expectations.  Some students open one ticket after another after another as if no one else needed the service but them.  Some just parachute into my Zoom office at any time and just assume I will be there and available.  (Some faculty stay in their Zoom rooms for "office hours," so this may be where that assumption comes from.)  Another student emailed to see if she could have a weekly meeting with anyone on the ETDR team.  In the academic economy, she seemed to think that opening a lot of tickets would benefit us instead of put a strain of human resources.  Another student went on a major rant when the person she was working with tried to get her to focus on the ETDR and not on her many complaints against other staff in the College where she was trying to earn a doctorate.  Still another tried to suggest that the staff who worked with her had advised her to use a particular citation method (which is not what the ETDR staff ever do)…and so was liable and needed to fix her dissertation to the satisfaction of her faculty advisor in the day or two before the ETDR submittal deadline.  

This is not to say that we do not sometimes go above and beyond. Sometimes, students have to meet in the off hours because of their work schedules or because they live in different time zones around the world.  Sometimes students break the appointment very close to the scheduled moment and think that it is simple to reschedule.  In busy seasons, once students lose their places, it is hard to fit them into a regular day slot, and I often end up working off-hours to accommodate them. Some simply lose their place and end up figuring out their ETDR issues themselves, which is fine, too.  Some students cannot output the .pdf and so need quick transcoding.  Recently, one student in a time zone some 12 hours away from CST sent a 100 GB file for transcoding and had to use Google Drive to do so.  A dozen students who had no other easy option for jumping the resolution on some of their diagrams asked if I would help them re-output the visuals, and in those cases, I did.  (This is after we explored available options in either Windows or Mac.)  These are all reasonable asks, in my book.  Then, too, graduate students will gossip, and ultimately, it does not help if one has a reputation for doing too much…because then students will in turn expect a lot of support.  [When handling student images or their ETDRs when I am transcoding, I always make a point to delete all versions of their imagery and work from the downloads folder, the desktop, and the OneDrive / SharePoint where the email attachments are…so they know that no other versions of their work is floating around.  Some students embargo their research for “hard intellectual property” / hard IP…such as patenting and trade secrets.  Others do so for publishing reasons. A few do so for only ego reasons and / or a misunderstanding of the embargoing mechanism.]

To keep things simple, I know if I step out of line, I own the liability.  There is no logical incentive to take on others’ work.  Opportunists will always ask for special favors.  They will always have favorite ITS staff on their mental speed dial for all things ETDR, including simple things that they can look up on Google or figure out themselves.  The constant being "online" during the pandemic gives people the sense of one's constant availability, as if one were some digital genie.  Several have made long lists of edits that they want made to their file, as if their work somehow is my direct responsibility.  For people who are nuisances (think emails every day or two), think "learned helplessness" about their own capabilities, think trying-to-delegate all their work to others, it is easy enough to block or to "ghost" them.  Such people do not take your word for it when you ask them to be responsible after one or two consultations.  They listen better if there is crickets.  With thin staffing, everyone has to protect themselves against burnout; it does hurt the team to let students assume that the staff are on call 24/7 for very simple questions that students themselves need to troubleshoot and address. That's the nature of the space and of people. 

And some rare students, even in normal circumstances, can get accusatory and negative.  

• In one case, with a dissertation with literally tens of thousands of “moving parts,” one student was annoyed when she had copied her second title page as her first and had her dissertation file rejected.  It is her responsibility to check for adherence to the standards.  No ETDR person does a final walk-through after all changes are made. No ETDR staff “validates” a dissertation particularly since they only review a file for basic functionality and do not see a version that has been finally edited after the meeting.  That is the responsibility of the student. 
• In another case, a graduate who had finished her degree and moved on contacted the ETDR staff to have them render digital images for her work, as if staff are on call forever after one or two consultations for the ETDR.  She made the request by email and never asked again once her request was put into the ticketing system.  Several students will have ETDR consultations. They will make a show of taking notes. Then, suddenly, they’ll not remember how to work a particular sequence. When pointed off to documentation materials and videos on YouTube, they insist on meeting via Zoom or in person (during a pandemic).  Sometimes students will undo the work that was done in an ETDR session. They’ll have deleted the corrections that they had put into place during the session.  Perhaps they are going back to their original mental track about the problem.  And they will ask to meet again.  And again.  In most cases, especially during the lead-up to the ETDR deadline, one meeting is all each student can schedule since there are others ahead of them who had not received any consultation at all.  
• Some students are already very stressed due to their studies and perhaps due to their relationship with technologies.  A number of students will try to shift blame to staff even if staff never touched their file and may not have even seen the file in the past half-year.  Students sometimes just assume that the staff should know what their time zone is (how would a person reasonably guess?) and respond accordingly.  Those kinds of irrationalities make the work more complex.  
• Some students will invite their friends to join a scheduled session without telling ETDR staff.
• Some students will record the session by having another log-in to the Zoom…and recording from there.  (Kansas is one-party consent, so these are not students who are breaking the law per se…but the premise is an untrusting one.) 
  
• During a session, one student went on a racialized rant as if that would motivate anyone on the staff to help her…and she has continuing putting in one ticket after another even after two support web conferencing meetings with two separate staff.  (In this case, she might do better going outside to hire someone to help her if she really has insufficient focus to learn the technology.)  Perhaps her unreasonable expectations for the amount of help available to her might be partially fueling her frustrations. Perhaps the personal attack was partially a product of the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic in combination with a lot of other pressures. Regardless, the student continued the harassment over a number of messages and only stopped when the associate dean of her college was notified. 
  

There is no benefit in having staff be any sort of “chokepoint” for those who want to finish their ETDRs.  The goal is to disintermediate this, to work myself out of having to do live consultations with students.  To achieve this, I have made a number of accessible videos to augment the print documentation.  This is why the informational content is broadly shared and the documentation for their usage is widely available.  We can give an assist where possible, but with staff focused on so many endeavors, people are not available for 24/7 help.  

Always respect (and candor) for the graduate students

Conclusion

All who support them really do want their best and highest.  We do not want to ruin their glorious moments of achievement.  We want all deadlines to be met.  We want students to acquire the skills needed to achieve their goals.  We work hard to empathize and understand and support.  Generally, it would help if students would reason through what proper expectations are for ETDR support and work with us; it would make the work less fraught.  In these challenging times, social niceties matter that much more as does the underlying mutual respect for all involved. 
 

---

About the Author

Shalin Hai-Jew works as an instructional designer / researcher at Kansas State University.  In May 2021, she presented at the CHECK conference on "Editing Digital Imagery in Research:  Exploring the Fidelity-to-Artificiality Continuum."  The early draft slideshow for this presentation is available on SlideShare.  The video of her presentation, which opens with a "shallow fake" is available on YouTube.  Her email is shalin@ksu.edu.  

Comment on this page