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Henry Fan · Application Support Analyst I

What does application support look like at statewide scale?

When 116 colleges share courses through the CVC Exchange, a single enrollment touches four SIS integration paths, a statewide SSO proxy, Canvas provisioning, and financial aid Consortium Agreements. Supporting that means knowing where things break, communicating across very different audiences, and documenting well enough that the next person doesn't start from scratch.

116
Connected Colleges
3
SIS Platforms
10
Barriers Identified
9
Interactive Tools
Troubleshooting methodology Multi-audience communication Pattern recognition Documentation discipline Barrier awareness
Background

The systems this role operates inside

Banner, PeopleSoft, Canvas LMS, financial aid workflows, enrollment sync, SSO troubleshooting. Context from four organizations where these were the daily environment — not electives.

SMCCD · 3 Colleges
Banner + PeopleSoft + Financial Aid
Multi-college district operations. Enrollment sync and FA workflows across both Banner and PeopleSoft. Found a race condition in the FA module — sync jobs pulling data before enrollment transactions committed.
BannerPeopleSoftFinancial AidEnrollment Sync
OpenStax · Rice University
Canvas LMS + Ticket Trend Analysis
Application support for a national ed-tech platform on Canvas. Quarterly ticket analysis in Python/pandas surfaced an OAuth token issue presenting as different symptoms across user roles.
Canvas LMSPythonpandasOAuth 2.0Ticket Analysis
Braven · San José State
Documentation Fix → Ticket Reduction
Recurring provisioning failures traced to outdated documentation, not a technical bug. Updated the docs; repeat tickets in that category dropped ~15% the following quarter.
Ticket TriageRoot Cause AnalysisData-DrivenKB Authoring
Foothill College · Student
The Student Side of These Systems
Started at Foothill. Navigated registration holds and financial aid workflows as a first-generation student — without a family who could explain how the system worked. That perspective informs how these tools think about the end user.
RegistrationFinancial AidStudent IdentityFirst-Gen
System Architecture

The cross-enrollment data flow — and where it breaks

Most support issues trace back to a break somewhere in this chain. Click any node to see what that layer does, what can go wrong, and what the analyst looks for first.

Cross-Enrollment Data Flow — Click to Explore
Home SIS
Banner Direct · Ethos
PeopleSoft · Colleague
→→→
AER Payload
CVC Exchange
Cross-enrollment
+ FA Dashboard
→→→
SIS + Canvas
Teaching College
Enrollment · Roster
Parchment transcript
→→→
IdP Proxy
Student
CCCID via SSO
Canvas access
01Visibility

Can the analyst spot a failing college before the tickets arrive?

The daily question: which of 116 colleges is healthy, which is degraded, and which is down? Search by name or SIS type, filter by status, and drill into any college for connection history and error detail.

Live
Auto-refresh: 30s
cvc-exchange-monitor.fhda.edu
02Diagnosis

When a student reports a missing course — where do you look?

Walk a real failure scenario layer by layer: student report → SIS query → API check → Exchange queue → resolution. Each layer produces logs. The analyst reads them in sequence to isolate the break without guessing.

Diagnostic
trace-id: CVC-2026-03-4821
Ready — click a layer or auto-run
03Patterns

Is this one ticket — or twenty waiting to happen?

12 weeks of ticket data by category. The question isn't "what happened this week" — it's "is this the beginning of a pattern?" Click insight cards to see which weeks correlate with known systemic issues.

Analysis
Q1 2026 · Ticket Trend Report
Tickets by Category
Jan – Mar 2026 · 0 total
04Documentation

If the fix isn't documented, it didn't scale.

Every resolved issue is a potential KB article. Four starter templates for the most common categories: integration failures, auth/SSO, sync issues, and new college onboarding. Edit inline, reorder steps, export as markdown.

Documentation
kb.cvc-oei.fhda.edu/articles/editor
Templates
Integration Fix
🔐Auth / SSO Issue
🔄Sync Resolution
📋Onboarding Guide
Communication

The same failure, written four different ways

A student needs reassurance. Campus IT needs the CCCID and error code. The registrar needs something to forward to their VP. The internal team needs scope and next steps. Same incident. Four drafts.

Scenario: A student cross-enrolled in MATH 1A via the Exchange, but the enrollment didn't sync to Canvas. They can't access their course. Here's the same incident, four ways:

🎓
To the Student
Email
We're aware your MATH 1A section isn't showing in Canvas yet. This is a sync issue between your home college and the teaching college — not a problem with your enrollment. Your seat is secure. We expect this to be resolved within 2–4 hours, and you'll receive a confirmation when your course appears. No action needed on your end.
🖥️
To Campus IT (Teaching College)
ServiceNow
AER for CCCID 0012847593 transmitted from Chabot at 14:22 PST but Canvas roster for MATH-1A-001 does not reflect enrollment. Ethos token at home college returned 401 invalid_grant — AER may not have reached your SIS. Can you verify whether the enrollment record exists in your Banner instance? If not, we'll re-push from the Exchange once the token is regenerated.
📋
To the Registrar
Email
Quick update on the cross-enrollment sync issue affecting some Exchange students. The student's enrollment is confirmed — the delay is in how the data is reaching Canvas, not in their registration status. If students contact your office, you can confirm their enrollment is valid. We're working with the teaching college IT team and expect resolution today. Happy to provide a written summary if this needs to go to your VP.
⚙️
To CVC Internal Team
Slack
Scope: 47 AER records pending in Chabot → De Anza queue since 02:00 PST. Root cause: Ethos OAuth2 token expired, invalid_grant on refresh. Affects all Chabot cross-enrollments to Banner Ethos colleges since 3/17. Action: Token regenerated. Queue flush in progress. Monitoring for full clearance. Will update when all 47 records are confirmed transmitted. KB article drafted.
Workflow

What a typical escalation path looks like

Student can't see their cross-enrolled course in Canvas. From first report to resolution and documentation — the steps an analyst would walk through.

Step 1
Monitor
Check college health — is the home SIS syncing?
Step 2
Tracer
Walk the data flow — where did the AER break?
Step 3
Patterns
Is this isolated or part of a larger trend?
Step 4
KB Builder
Document the fix for the next analyst
Step 5
Barriers
Is this a symptom of a systemic barrier?
Barrier Intelligence
Beyond the ticket queue — systemic friction
Some tickets aren't bugs — they're symptoms of structural barriers in how course sharing works today. Identified from CVC documentation, college FAQs, and the Spring 2025 FA dashboard rollout.
10
Known Barriers
4
Equity-Critical
5
New Tools
05Barriers

Ten friction points a support analyst can act on

Not product roadmap items. These are barriers where documentation, data, escalation framing, and campus coordination can reduce the impact now — even before engineering fixes land.

Barriers
cvc-barrier-intelligence.fhda.edu
06Lifecycle

Where in the enrollment process do students hit friction?

Nine steps from course search to MIS reporting. Red nodes are where students get stuck or dropped. Amber is where manual workarounds are required. Green steps flow cleanly.

Lifecycle
Cross-enrollment barrier mapping
07Campus Intel

Not every college has the same support profile

A Banner Direct college with full FA automation has different needs than a Colleague Ethos college still on the manual email workflow. Filter by SIS type to see which barriers apply where.

Matrix
campus-readiness.cvc-oei.fhda.edu
CollegeSISFA DashboardSSOKnown Barriers
08Equity

Which barriers hit the most vulnerable students hardest?

Not all friction is equal. A payment timing issue is an inconvenience for some students and a semester-ending crisis for others. Scored 1–10 by equity impact.

Equity
equity-impact-analysis
09Correlation

How much of the ticket queue is preventable?

If the top three barrier categories account for over half the queue, the fastest path to reducing volume isn't faster resolution — it's reducing the friction that creates the tickets.

Correlation
Q1 2026 · Ticket-to-Barrier Analysis
Good support is invisible to students. When it works, they never think about it. When it doesn't — it's someone's semester.

These tools are a starting point — a way to think through what the daily work looks like, where the current pain points are, and how the support function scales when every college has different systems, different staffing, and different needs.

Day-one readiness
Banner, PeopleSoft, Canvas, FA workflows — these are familiar systems, not a learning curve.
Work style
Document as you go. Escalate with data, not just a flag. Find the pattern, not just the fix.
Perspective
Started at Foothill College as a first-generation student. The student side of these systems isn't theoretical.

Henry Fan
Application Support Analyst I Candidate · CVC-OEI
Foothill–De Anza Community College District