Classes offer tech knowledge

Student technology fees are like taxes. They're levied against students even if they don't use tech services. \nEvery year, student tech fees pool millions of dollars. The money is then spent for student services, Karen Adams, chief information officer and chief of staff in the IU Office of the Vice President for Information Technology said. But one of these services, the Student Technology Education Program Series, is unknown to and underused by many students.\nSTEPS are free hands-on computer training workshops run by IT Training and Education. Its annual budget rose 10 percent to $356,374 in 2001, according to UITS cost analysis data. But over the last five years, the number of STEPS users has steadily decreased, according to UITS's annual user surveys. In 1997, 32 percent of students surveyed said they had used the service. In 2001, the usage rate dipped by half, and only 14 percent said they'd used the service. \nBut of those students who used STEPS last year, more than 95 percent graded it better than satisfactory, and this has been the case for the past five years. \nSTEPS are workshops that teach high-tech tools such as Windows, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, HTML, Netscape Composer, Dreamweaver and UNIX free of charge. Most tools are explored through basic, advanced and expert classes, and each class lasts two to three hours. No registration is required. \nPeople in IT Training and Education, which runs STEPS workshops, seem baffled. Their workshops satisfy most users but attract only a few students. \nITTE manager Chris Payne suggested three possible reasons students don't attend STEPS. Many prefer self-learning through NETg, the online tutorial software that teaches about 600 high tech tools. Many students are already high-tech savvy as well, and then there are those who don't seem to know about STEPS. Payne said he doubts undergraduates are aware of the service.\nAn informal survey conducted by the IDS on March 18 asked 30 underclassmen in the East Lounge of the Indiana Memorial Union if they'd ever heard of the service. Twenty-four hadn't. The same query was posed before 50 undergraduates at the IMU's Burger King. Forty-one said no. Of those same 80 students, only 11 said they had heard of or knew about NETg. \nThese 80 students cannot speak for all 26,000 undergraduates, but Payne's third guess seems not off the mark. Many students probably don't know they are funding STEPS through the technology fee. \nIn early January, Brandon Minton was Web-tech-illiterate. He could manipulate Word, Excel and PowerPoint like toys, he said. But he stood helpless before Web publishing tools.\n"I had no idea on how to build a Web site," Minton said.\nSince then, Minton, a senior majoring in informatics, has taken nine STEPS workshops: HTML, Dreamweaver, Netscape Composer, Photoshop and UNIX, among others. They took more than 20 hours, but he netted huge returns. \nToday, Minton can craft a Web site in two hours or less, he said. \n"First, I would open Dreamweaver," he said. "Then, I would start typing text that I would have on my page. Once I figured out the frame and how I wanted to go, I would place all the HTML tags. And the next thing would be to open up Photoshop and start making some designs that I could implement onto my Web site.\n"Once I laid out everything correctly…I would publish it on an SQL server. And everybody would see it."\nSTEPS instructors never forsake students for the sake of class progress, Minton said. \n"They are decent people," he said. "Really helpful. Really nice. Extremely nice." \nDavid A. Ray, a doctoral student in the School of Music who aims to become an opera singer, is one of those "decent people." Ray, a part-time instructor, lectures confidently before students, his voice resonating as if through a microphone. \nBut when he became an instructor in the summer of 2000, he was an Internet surfer who knew only Excel. \n"I thought that I had a great talent for playing video games, but not much more than that," he said. \nSo his supervisors told him: Learn before you teach. \nRay's training regimen was STEPS workshops. He joined classes as an observer and studied with students. \n"You would do this -- perhaps two to three times per class -- before moving on to the role of assistant," he said.\nTo become an instructor, one would observe two classes or more, he said. Behind the scenes, Ray said he studied textbooks to know them inside and out. He wanted to find the most effective ways to teach. He also studied how and why people used the software covered by the textbooks. \n"I feel as though I would be cheating the students to a certain extent," he said, "if I simply stood in front of class, walked through the materials and had no idea myself why I was doing certain things." \nSince January 2001, 3,000 STEPS users have taken after-class surveys by IT Training and Education. 80 percent of them said the level, pace and teaching range of workshops were "just right." 90 percent graded instructors "good" or "very good" at explaining subjects and answering questions. Assistant instructors were also called "good" or "very good" by 90 percent of those surveyed. And almost all said the classes were "satisfactory" experiences. \nSTEPS class materials have won two awards from the Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services, a national organization that ranks colleges and universities by their quality of IT training. \nYet ITTE staff don't know why STEPS is unappealing to many students. Payne and Macmillan said they crave any advice from students. \nUITS has no plan to abort STEPS, Karen Adams said. Students will keep funding the program, whether they like it or not.\nIf they are not grad students, who are said to use STEPS more often, said Carol Macmillan,web education specialist of ITTE. But people in IT Training and Education don't want those feelings to fester. \n"Yes, we will work even harder to market to the undergraduate students," Macmillan said. ITTE will make undergraduates realize that "IT skills is what can set them apart from other job candidates, and help them edge out the competition," she said.