Online support site: From IT support to digital literacies

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For several  years now we have had a comprehensive Online support site for our students, designed to provide them with somewhere to go to for help before they phone up our IT support guys with questions we have already told them the answers to in 5 places, as well as other bits of useful information we think students might want to know.  Several years ago now as part of the JISC funded Isthmus project we created a set of resources around what we then called “new media literacies” (yes we were trying to support digital literacies before they even had a name….).  This was a pretty basic set of resources covering areas such as online information sources, citation tools, searching online, we branded it learning support and didn’t give it much further thought.

Rolling forward to our termly review of course delivery we were looking at the stats for our support site, and realised that with the exception of obvious lures such as our 2 minute guide to Moodle (ave time spent on page 1 min 56) and logging into your course, the most visited pages are largely from the “digital literacies” subsection of the site.

I don’t think we can draw any major conclusions from this, but you can at least say our students increasingly don’ t seek help with basic IT skills, but may be looking to improve their wider skill set.

 

 

This entry was posted in Digital literacy, Isthmus, JISC by Marion Manton. Bookmark the permalink.

About Marion Manton

I amSenior Manager: Learning Design and co-manager of TALL with David White. Previous to that I was eLearning Research Project Manager. As well as the day to day running of TALL I am responsible for the ensuring that all TALL programmes are best practice examples of learning online for their audience. I work closely with course teams to specify the learning they want to achieve with their programme and to identify the best uses of technology to do this. I also maintain currency with the latest research in eLearning, to ensure that TALL is aware of and exploits the best current knowledge of what works in terms of effective eLearning. My particular interests are in effective pedagogical models for different learning scenarios and how best to facilitate these by the appropriate use of technology. As well as the development of effective tools and processes to help academics identify these and translate knowledge of their subject and teaching into high quality online learning.