New skill acquisition must be designed to fulfill the goal that all users, faculty, students and staff, must attain an appropriate level of understanding and performance to ensure effective use of advanced technologies available to them.
Not-for-credit training is available for users which stresses basic understanding and uses of hardware and software. Often, these training sessions center upon the basic needs of the College: standardized forms, formats, e-mail, intranet sites, etc. These sessions are only hours in length and may be a prerequisite to accessing a new tool or application. As users become more sophisticated, the sessions would center on new uses and specialized capability.
New staff and students must be automatically scheduled, as a part of their orientation, to the basic courses necessary to appropriate use of the technology available to them.
The College may wish to develop a systematic assessment procedure for new students, faculty and staff to assure that the capability exists to use new technologies.
Upgrade skills (software upgrade or refresher)
Remedial credit, not-for-credit, or other incentives could be offered to upgrade skills. These incentives could include continued access or access to an upgrade version of a given software.
Regardless of whether the skill is new or an upgrade, the opportunity for participants to practice the new skill immediately is critical to success. When a major upgrade is planned, the training should be scheduled coincident with the rollout of the upgrade to allow users the immediate opportunity to practice.
Specialized training
Demand from the College community and from the business community will require that specialized training be tailored to the particular need, either in a cutting edge technology or, perhaps, in an esoteric one which is fundamental to the group requesting the training.
Specific coursework will address needs of users in the use of specific, perhaps specialized, hardware and software. These courses are narrow in scope and specific to the use of the applications and hardware. They are designed to acquaint or master the use of the tool in real-life situations, perhaps part of a series of courses leading to a certification or business-required criteria. The lab or facility use for specialized training will need the ability to flexibly re-image machines to prepare for the next training which may require a very different software, and, perhaps, hardware configuration. It is even possible that some additional storage will be needed adjacent to these areas to facilitate the storage of particular hardware while it is re-imaged for reuse or stored for next use.
TrainingTechnology Committee Chair © Copyright 1999-2005 Kellogg Community College. All rights reserved.