ARCHIVED: Completed project: IT Training Tips blog

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Primary UITS contact: Chris Payne

Completed: April 17, 2009

Description: In support of Empowering People (ITSP2) Action 26, UITS IT Training has developed a blog, called IT Training Tips, which hosts short training tutorials on new and emerging IT technologies of interest to the statewide IU community. The training offered addresses a wide range of topics and skill levels, and is delivered in a variety of modalities. The blog is open to contribution from other UITS, campus, and statewide training and support providers, and is comment-enabled for users to encourage interactivity and dialogue. It also has the informal conversational style of a blog to help facilitate that dialogue.

Outcome: The blog is integrated with UITS training offerings in order to become a primary resource for rapidly developed online training. The blog also cross-links to the Knowledge Base and other established UITS resources, as deemed appropriate. In addition, by inviting input from the statewide university training and support community, the blog enables campuses to provide quick tutorials to their user communities, some of which will be of use to other campus communities as well. The informal conversational style of the blog is also intended to engage users in a dialogue with IU training and support providers statewide.

Milestones and status:

Development of technical requirements and features analysis of blogging tools available Completed November 2008
Development of user interface Completed December 2008
Introduce pilot version of site and solicit participation from training and support providers statewide Completed February 2009
Move into production and start promoting Completed March 2009

Comment process: The blog facilitates commenting and feedback from the user community and campus training and support providers.

Benefits: This helps address the needs outlined in Empowering People (ITSP2) Action 26, which calls for training to be available 24-7 on a wide range of topics and skill levels, delivered in multiple modalities. Through this blog, readers have access to quality training materials 24-7 delivered in a variety of modalities, including video demonstrations. Additionally, by publishing training resources from support and training providers statewide, the blog offers resources to users across all campuses on a range of topics of particular interest to them.

Related information: The blog's URL is http://ittrainingtips.iu.edu.

Issues: The blog uses WordPress with a MySQL back end running on WebServe. We will not be able to use the current version of WordPress until the MySQL version on WebServe is made current. That is currently expected to happen in summer of 2009.

Client impact: We expect that clients will appreciate the ability to access high-quality tutorials at any time, from anywhere, on a wide range of topics of special interest to the IU community. We expect the conversational style of the blog to encourage their participation. In addition, the instantly published nature of blog posts will ensure that the content will be responsive and address new and emerging technologies in which users are interested.

Project team:

Chris Payne (project manager)
Amy Neymeyr, Tom Mason (implementation team)

Governance: The site is managed, and contributed articles are vetted for appropriateness and clarity, by the professional staff team of UITS IT Training.