Training statistics (general IT and Corporate Systems)
The following statistics include all IT Services general IT and Corporate Information Systems courses. They do not include Information literacy skills training offered by the library or the High Performance Computing courses run by the Advanced Computing Research Centre.
- Course titles
- Course sessions and other ways to learn
- Enrolments
- Trainee days
- What are people learning about
- Evaluations - how well are we doing?
Course titles
In the academic year 09-10, the IT Services IT Training team offered 105 distinct course titles, 78 titles for staff and research postgraduates and 27 titles for taught students.
Course sessions and other ways to learn
A course session is course title offered on a particular date. Most of our sessions are a half-day or whole-day long, or shorter, but some courses have up to 2.5 days of teaching.
In the academic year 09-10, IT Services offered 766 classes, 682 for staff and research postgraduates and 84 for taught students.
About 2/3 of our classes are traditional courses (trainer-led hands-on group sessions). However, we continue to diversify the forms of training on offer, including much one-to-one training and consultancy help, training presentations, and supervised self-paced learning sessions. 09-10 saw a substantial increase in the number of presentation sessions because this was a major way of disseminating information and advice on Integrated Purchasing (Proactis) and upgrading to Office 2007.
Face to face learning (be it on courses, one-to-one sessions, or presentations) is not the only way to learn. These statistics do not include the self-paced learning that individuals may do by downloading from our extensive range of learning resources. During 09-10 we made it much easier to find relevant learning materials by making available a find a learning resource search facility on the Information Services training and learning resources page.
We also surveyed a subset of staff, asking the question "What are your preferred ways of learning how to use new IT systems?" (more than one choice from a list was possible). Taught courses remain popular, but people also use web-based and other self-study materials. Trial-and-error (aka "exploratory learning") is also a choice (or necessity) for a significant number of people.
Enrolments
In the academic year 09-10, 2959 places were enroled on our hand-on courses; 2309 staff and research postgraduates (up by 600 on the previous year) and 650 taught students (down by 46).
Any member of University staff may book a one-to-one training or consultancy session with a web, corporate systems, or general IT trainer (subject to having a specific work-related need agreed in advance with the trainer and line-manager approval as necessary). The graph below shows that an ever-growing number of staff take advantage of that opportunity, often when they need to know how to do something before a scheduled course rolls around, or they have a detailed query not covered by a course.
And in 09-10 there were nearly 1200 attendances on our short "roadshow" talks on Integrated Purchasing (Proactis) and upgrading to Office 2007.
Trainee days
Trainee days is a measure of the overall amount of training received. It is calculated by multiplying the length of the course by the number of attendees, so a half-day course attended by 7 people delivers 3.5 trainee days. In 09-10, the trainers spent nearly 350 days in the training room delivering over 2000 trainee days - 1759 days for staff and research postgraduates and 261 days for taught students. This is an increase of 530 trainee days on the previous year, accounted for mainly by increased training for staff.
What are people learning about?
The following graphs clearly show that training in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and the web remains as important as ever, but the current major growth area is in CIS (Corporate Information Systems) training for staff, especially as new systems from the INFORMS programme (Integrated Purchasing and Financial Management Reporting) started to be rolled out.
Students clearly continue to want courses on Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint).
Evaluations - how well are we doing?
Everybody who comes on a computing course is asked to complete a course evaluation survey. Questions asked of staff include:
- How appropriate was the course contents to your needs?
- How effective was the trainer?
- How far were your hopes met?
On a scale from 0 to 5, staff continued to rate all our courses highly.
Staff are also asked:
- How confident were you with the topic before the course?
- How confident are you now?
On a scale from 0 to 5, staff report an increase in confidence following our courses.
Evaluation questions asked of students include:
- Did the content of the session meet your needs?
- How effective was the trainer?
- How suitable was the format and structure of the session?
- How suitable was the pace (speed) of the session?
- How much did you learn about the topic(s) taught?
On a scale from 0 to 5, students also consistently rate all our courses highly.
Students are also asked:
- How confident were you with the topic before the course?
- How confident are you now?
On a scale from 0 to 5, students also report an increase in confidence as the result of attending:
Another way to look at the increase in confidence people get as the result of attending an IT course is to plot the proportion of people who report a particular increase in their confidence. The following graph shows that the majority of people who attend our courses increase in confidence by at least 1 or 2 points on a 5-point scale.
