I’m currently involved in giving training through IT Services training courses as mentioned in a previous post from Shirley. This training is:

• for both students and staff at the University
• mostly on the Office products, i.e. Word, Excel PowerPoint and Access
• run at different levels from essential through intermediate to advanced

I’m mainly involved in the Word and PowerPoint training at all levels and the training for Excel at essential and intermediate level.

We tend to get mostly students on these classes, a lot of them international students. This has been the case for a number of years now. A number of the advanced classes, especially Word, originally had in mind secretaries, but we mostly get students on these. In the last 6-7 years, we have put on specific classes on using Word to lay out a thesis aimed at postgraduate students (these seem to be very popular).

Nearly all of the above training is done face-to-face as a taught class, though some of the advanced classes involve the trainees choosing and working through the training notes that are of most interest to them with help on hand.

We also offer Drop-In-And-Learn (Di&L) sessions for one-to-one help and where trainees cannot make a timetabled session. Surprisingly, these often get busier in the vacation due to postgraduate students needing help with the lay out of their dissertations.

I’m also involved in exclusive staff training through both CSTD (Centre for Staff Development and Training) and CDoTL (Centre for the Development of Teaching and Learning). This training is on the following:

• Blackboard at a basic level to help people get started with their online courses
• CMS (Content Management System) for managing official/corporate web pages
• Outlook for email and appointments/meetings

For the CMS training, I also offer special help sessions where staff can book a 30 minute slot for some CMS issues that they’re currently having.