Rethink, restructure, redesign: new approaches to workshop content

ABSTRACT

Instructional Services at the University of Kansas offers an extensive schedule of free workshops to help the members of the KU community gain confidence and skill in computing and using information technology. The Instructional Services staff teach a wide range of workshops, including: Internet and Outlook services; authoring, publishing, and managing Web sites; graphics, multimedia production, office productivity, and data analysis software; and operating systems. There are 54 different workshop on these topics.

Workshops include demonstrations and hands-on sessions that run from one to four hours. Most of the hands-on sessions are 3 to 4 hours in length. Lately, we have found it challenging to get students, staff and faculty to attend even some of our more popular workshops due to the length of the courses. We also know that people need features in our introductory workshops, but they are still not attending them. They are often skipping the "Introduction" workshops because they feel they already have those skills; therefore, they go straight to the Intermediate level workshops.

We found a way to "entice" them to our workshops. By offering "chunks" of software information in 55-minute segments we feel we are making these shorter workshops more attractive to people. We will show you how the process of breaking down our large curriculum into smaller "chunk" sections, changing the title of workshops to pinpoint what is to be covered, and making other modifications has increased our workshop participation overall.

References

1. Libraries Instructional Services workshop list. http://www.infotraining.ku.edu

Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • Project and people management

        • Computer and information systems training