Basic Info About Training Workshops at Michigan
From: Diana L Perpich <dperpich@umich.edu>
Date: July 25, 2007 8:56:54 AM EDT
To: Juliette Mai <juliemai@stanford.edu>
Subject: Re: Sakai training at University of Michigan
Hello, Juliette-Let me first give you brief, direct-esque answers to the questions you asked. I'm
pretty much a eRambler, so I'll probably have lots of additional comments, but
here goes:
- What is your strategy for recruiting users to your training workshop?
We sometimes include links to upcoming workshops in the MOTD (message of
the day) on the front page of their workspace, but don't do much more direct
promotion. Our University Library runs a well-respected facility called the Faculty
Exploratory. They offer monthly workshops designed primarily for faculty on all
sorts of commonly used applications. I teach most of my workshops down there,
and CTools (our Sakai) has been on their schedule there since Day 1. They do
some general facility promotion. I also work with CRLT (Center for Research on
Learning and Teaching). They organize new faculty orientation each fall, and a
CTools quickstart session has been part of that event for the last couple of years.
They then in turn point folks to the Library for additional training. Some units will
request localized workshops, and I'm quite keen on these. My MOTD often
includes an invitation to contact CTools if you have 5 or more colleagues who
would like to organize a departmental workshop. Additionally, we have
unit/college IT (or sometimes EdTech ) contacts who know to call and request
local workshops. A few deans have very strongly recommended that X or Y
instructors have sites; and in that case, we get some pretty good attendance.
The date/time/location and promotion are handled locally by the unit.
- How long are the training sessions (e.g., < 1 hour, > 1 hour)?
I usually do a two-hour hands-on session, but my quickstart can be done in 30
minutes. I try to never go over 45 minutes if I'm just doing a demo.
- What do you usually cover in the training? Are they "general" training sessions
or "targeted" sessions for particular departments/schools?
The general training covers basic orientation to the system, new site setup, and
then what I consider the common "distribution" tools: resources, announcements
(also recent announcements), and the schedule-- the most often used tools, and
the ones that students don't write to by default. Oh, and the Home page. That
doesn't sound like much for two hours, but there's got to be time for exploring
Site Info. Instructors need to know about publishing and unpublishing, adding
and dropping participants (and tools). By the time I give them a peek at a few
live sites, talk about the relationship between CTools and our Registrar system,
and walk them through a new site setup, I usually have one hour left for site
contents. I don't usually teach the Syllabus tool, which sounds odd, but since
most of our instructors already have a Word or PDF syllabus, the simplest way to
get it on the site is usually to upload it to resources and leave it there. Getting
the Syllabus tool to point to it isn't as intuitive as it might be. I will also often
introduce the email archive tool during this workshop, though we don't actually do
anything with it during the workshop-- getting into webmail to send a sample
message to the site takes up too much time and some instructors don't use
webmail to begin with, so I end up teaching a whole separate application!
I usually call that workshop something like "CTools for Basic Course Websites." I
also do one called "CTools for Basic Project Collaboration." The more advanced
workshop deals with what I consider the interactive tools, the ones where
students can, must, or are most likely to post to the site: chat, discussions,
assignments, drop box, and sometimes the wiki.
The quick start gets them a basic orientation to the system, a brisk walk-through
site setup, and the four clicks necessary to upload a sample syllabus.doc in the
resource area.
- On average, how many people attend the training?
Depends on the time of year. The Fac Exp has 17 stations, and all seats are
usually filled when I offer a Basic Course Websites workshop just before the start
of a major term (we call them Fall and Winter). When I offer sessions once a
month the rest of the year, 8 is a good turn out. I do departmental trainings for a
few as 5, since small departments can be very tight and prize their autonomy.
- Were the training sessions hands-on or entirely lecture-based?
Training sessions are always hands-on. If they're not hands on, I usually call
them demos.
- If attendee feedback were collected, what did they find most helpful vs. least
helpful?
Let me think more carefully about this one before I answer.
- What type of assessment did you use to measure effectiveness of the training
sessions?
I only give end-of-workshop evaluations once a year, during our EdTech
conference called Enriching Scholarship. That's a week-long blitz of training the
week after the end of our Winter term, usually the first week in May (yes... don't
laugh... May is considered the end of winter). That week, we've got 7 separate
units offering 110 workshops; about 10 of which are CTools workshops. Every
session gives an end-of-workshop evaluation that week. I can send you a copy
of the assessment and also some participant feedback if you'd like.
We also ask a few questions about training as part of our CTools survey of users
each spring. That's interesting to me because it captures feedback/impressions
about CTools training from both people who attended a workshop and also those
who didn't.
- Which disciplines were most represented?
That depends. A couple of years ago, the dean of our liberal arts college very,
very, very strongly recommended that all 100-level courses have CTools sites.
LSA instructors were strongly represented at trainings that August. The next
year, it was 200-level courses, and so that produced a bump in LSA attendance.
Dental Hygiene recently rewrote their curriculum, and so we saw a with them
bump last year.
The distinction that interests me is the faculty, instructor, staff participation.
Maybe we've been around long enough so that most tenured and tenure-track
faculty have already attended; or maybe they're well enough connected within
their departments so that they get one-on-one help locally, but generally
speaking I think I see more non-tenure-track instructors and graduate teaching
instructors than faculty. Attendance at workshops is often more than 50% staff.
These staff are often responsible for assisting departmental faculty with their
course websites. But they are also attending because they need to use CTools
for departmental administrative work-- communicating with faculty about
departmental business.
We get our share of GSIs, to be sure, but I'm also pretty sure that many of them
are setting up their sites without taking training. To my knowledge, no unit
requires training.
- Do you continue to provide this training or have you stopped? If you stopped,
why?
I still provide training.
- If you didn't provide training workshops, what other options were available to
your users (e.g., online tutorials)?
We don't offer online tutorials. I haven't ever wanted to get into that business.
With the software changing as often as it has, sometimes in significant ways, I
don't want to have to keep updating online training media. I also feel pretty
strongly that the people who most need help with our online system don't feel
very comfortable learning this sort of thing online. I think our user data bears that
out. When we ask how people prefer to learn about this sort of thing, live
interactions and figure it out myself score higher than online tutorials.
We have created a few bite-sized demos on Adding Participants, Importing
Materials, and Rearranging Tabs. They're available on our Help page and our
documentation manager can probably give you usage statistics.
When a department, unit, or project rep has contacted me asking for a tutorial, I
usually engage them in a conversation about the specific ways she's expecting
her users to interact with the system-- specifically the site(s) in question. After
conversation, we sometimes decide a local hands-on session is in order. Other
times, I work with the rep to create a customized document with screenshots
from the actual site they will be using.