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Training & Documentation Abstracts
A Wiki: One Tool for Communication, Collaboration, and Collection of Documentation
Wikis have become a popular tool on college campuses for documentation and collaboration. Despite the wide spread use of wikis, many users still do not understand what a wiki is, how it used or how to apply it to their needs. The myriad of uses for wikis and figuring out how to use them can be overwhelming.
At SUNY Geneseo, we use two different wikis to address two different technical requirements. One wiki is for internal documentation used by the technical users of CIT and the other wiki is a campus wide wiki system where any department or individual can have a wiki for whatever subject they wish. The campus wide wiki system was installed two years ago and has many uses including documentation, collaborative writing, committee work, and more.
We have addressed many problems along the way including administration, policies, technical issues, and issues of adoption and advocacy. Many of the issues we have overcome can help other IT departments looking to install a wiki or to get their existing wiki to be more widely accepted and adopted. We will also show some of the unique and interesting ways our wiki is being used.
Establishing and Delivering Training for the Zimbra Collaboration Suite
Thinking of moving to Zimbra? Have a large user community with many disparate mail and calendaring servers? Then this is for you!
In the summer of 2001, Wayne State University (WSU) began to use Mirapoint's WebMail system and have been using it since. WSU has never had a true campus-wide calendaring solution (even with our Campus Pipeline/Luminis installation) nor have we been able to provide our users with proper e-mail quotas (most users are still allowed 30MB only), which has led to numerous departmental servers being brought up to fill the gap. In early 2007, the search to find a new system to address the needs and proliferation of servers began, with the search eventually settling on the Zimbra Collaboration System.
In February of 2009, WSU began migrating to Zimbra (referred to at WSU as "Wayne Connect"), which necessitated training and documentation for over 50,000 users. We will use WSU's migration as a case study for exploring the needs and approaches we used (including online and instructor-led delivery of the training).
If your institution is entertaining the idea of migrating to Zimbra then this is for you.
Google This! Using Google Apps for Collaboration and Productivity
This year, Colorado State University migrated to Google Apps for Education as an e-mail hosting solution for its students from an internal hosted e-mail system. The additional capabilities of Google Apps, originally seen as a nonessential add-on to the e-mail solution, have boosted the collaboration and communication among CSU's students beyond our expectations. With faculty and staff allowed to opt-in to CSU's Google Apps, this allows collaboration between faculty and students on a scale not previously witnessed at CSU. Faculty who have made the switch to Google Apps are satisfied and enthusiastic with the service. The Google Apps for Education suite comprises Google Mail, Calendar, Talk, Docs, Sites and Video, and we will provide an overview of each App as well as specific techniques on each App. We will discuss the potentials of teamwork and idea exchange made possible by Google Apps and how they can be applied in the academic environment. We will discuss and demonstrate interoperability between Google Apps and external applications, IT team collaboration, student employee management integration, migration techniques and more.
How to Conduct a Needs Assessment Study on Training and Documentation
This paper will offer a summary of the tools and techniques that were used for a Training and Documentation Needs Assessment Study recently completed by the Information Technology Services (ITS) division at Ithaca College, located in Ithaca, New York. The structure, design, and tools of this study provide a model for user support professionals and others within information technology service organizations at higher education institutions to adopt to carry out a needs assessment study with users on their own campuses.
Ithaca College provides centralized user support services, such as training and documentation, through ITS. The goal of the ITS Training and Documentation Needs Assessment Study was to obtain feedback from faculty, staff, and students on current training and documentation services delivered by ITS (Information Technology Services), as well as to gather ideas for adding to, modifying, and improving these services in the future.
Three standard communications research tools were employed to complete this study: focus groups, interviews, and a survey. Results from these data collection instruments were analyzed into a report on responses across and within the three target populations (faculty, staff, and students). Moreover, these results were synthesized into a set of recommendations, which are being used to shape the delivery of training and documentation services to the campus community.
Information Security Training – What Will you Communicate?
When West Virginia University decided to initiate Information Security training, the big question was “what topics should be included?” The selection of content was quickly recognized as an important step and proved to be vital to the program’s success. The content had to address the key risks in an easily understandable format. The goal is to build awareness of information security issues, threats, and vulnerabilities while communicating roles and responsibilities for protecting information resources and establishing best practices by instilling security-conscious behavior. Since this was an initial effort, the content needed to reach the lowest common denominator of the audience while not compromising any industry standards. The available staff and resources played a big part in our initial decision which was later changed. Selecting the right content from a myriad of public resources or using a commercially available product may drive your implementation time. However, do commercially available products meet your need? In the interest of flexibility, customization, and phased implementation, West Virginia University chose to develop our own content. That decision has proven to be successful. With that in mind, let’s explore how you can choose a commercially available product or develop your own training content for a successful Information Security Training program that becomes a key component for driving the cultural changes required to integrate security standards and practices into daily habits and sustain long-term organizational benefits.
Making Help Desk training interactive and interesting for student technicians by allowing them to select, create and edit material on a training “Dashboard”
The frequency of questions asked by student techs when a customer calls is in direct correlation with customer hold time and interrupts to full-time staff throughout their work day. A “dashboard” solution is one way to address the need to make student staff self-sufficient so that full time employees are able to concentrate on other mission critical projects.
While providing the student staff with continuous support on frequently asked questions, our “Dashboard” will also serve as a support tool for training on institutional knowledge and subjects on computing services external to the Help Desk. Training needs will be addressed by adding topics on maintenance and support for WSU computing systems. This format allows training which will be dynamic and continuous.
Initially charged with creating a technical platform for the “Dashboard,” I began to solicit input from my peers in an effort to keep from reinventing the wheel. With the current economic climate, our solution needed to be developed using a tool with low maintenance and support for the initial implementation. The best proposed solution for this was to create a Blackboard course which is not term specific.
With the Blackboard solution, we are able to do more with less. Help Desk fulltime personnel who provide direction will be given a charge to add to the skill set of veteran student staff, as well as to conduct initial training for new hires. In addition, students will be allowed to interact by posting to discussion forums and adding discussion threads on support issues. With content added by students on the “Dashboard,” there is a self-serve element added to the training for our student staff.
Personality-Aware Interfaces for Learning Applications
Although several personalization features are included in the design of e-learning applications, both the personality and the cognitive requirements of the users are among the last characteristics that are considered. As a result, almost all software applications usually present contents in exactly the same fashion to all users, without taking into account their different attitudes. Conversely, cognitive theories declare that the learning process can be improved by tailoring the way in which information is conveyed. Unfortunately, many parameters have to be processed to obtain reliable results.
In this study, we introduce a light-weight framework for eliciting personality traits and translating them into user interface characteristics which adapt on-line to the diverse learning styles. Our system exploits the Gestalt theory to recognize the heterogeneity of cognitive requirements, and simultaneously to segment user populations. Also, a personality-aware interface automatically reconfigures its information presentation layer in real-time, according to the character traits acquired from the users, to improve the learning performance.
We evaluated the bi-directional relationship between personality and interface in the context of e-learning software, computer-based training systems, and web-based customer management services. Our experimental study focused on the mutual influence between the fashion of the information presentation layer and the cognitive attitude of the users. The results show that, by choosing the appropriate parameters and by tuning the interface accordingly, the learning curve can be reshaped so that the time required to manage both the application features and the content can be shortened by approximately 30%.
Read All About It! Help Desk Newsletter Enlightens and Entertains Organization!
A successful help desk is equipped with extensive knowledge of every policy, service and application maintained by their campus’ IT organization. Without this knowledge, they would fail to provide top-tier service. But how much does a typical IT organization know about the help desk that is supporting their services? In the case of the CITES Help Desk at the University of Illinois the answer was unfortunately “not much.” The staggering quantity of interesting facts, figures, questions, answers and anecdotes at our fingertips could fill dozens of volumes. So, we decided to record our experiences to paper (or PDF, as the case may be) in the form of a monthly newsletter.
The Help Desk distributed the first issue of The Queue in September 2008. Each published issue includes articles that help CITES understand who we are, what we do and how we do it. Our regular rotation of features includes a monthly report highlighting our statistical breakdown of customer contacts for the month, a conversation with a service manager known as the “Service Spotlight”, a biography of a Help Desk full-timer, and other timely or interesting pieces about Help Desk happenings.
The Queue has improved our transparency and opened more than a few eyes around CITES. Our colleagues’ understanding of how we do business is developing, and this is helping us provide even better service to our internal and external customers alike.
The A.R.T. of Content Management Training
Keeping your institution’s website Accurate, Relevant, and Timely can be a challenge when you have multiple content management specialist/web publishers with varying skills and knowledge contributing to your website.
Widener University has migrated to a new content management system and our challenge was how to train internal staff the basics of content management.
Staff Challenges:
- Low to average technical/computer skills
- Lack of general Web awareness
- Time
- Inclination
At Widener University we created (6) 2 hour classes that had to be taken in entirety to obtain a Content Management Professional certificate. All the classes were offered through our Life-Long Learning Professional Development series giving the student 12 hours of instruction.
This course covered the basics of content management including, HTML, web design, writing for the web, search engine optimization and more.
Individuals already providing content, those interested in learning more about content management and web publishers were invited to participate in this 6-week course.
Outcome: Individuals who attended classes dramatically increased their skill set and had a better understanding of the content management system. The present website contributors increased their skill set in website design and application and added these skills to their repertoire.
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