Online support site: From IT support to digital literacies
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.