Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4. Skills and opportunities before and after attending the school
of the survey. Similar excellent ratings were shown by items like “atmosphere,” “interesting
topics,” “organization,” and “help and support.” In total, 73% of the respondents
completely
agreed with the statement that they will recommend the school. Furthermore, 27% agreed with
this statement, no one disagreed or strongly disagreed. A high percentage (97%) of the
participants said that their expectations were (at least) met, two out of three said that their
expectations were excelled.
CONCLUSION
The project “S3: Senior Surf School” was an assignment for graduate students of
Information Systems at the University of Applied Sciences in Hannover. The students had
to design, organize, manage, and run a training event, where elderly people could see and try
using the Internet. This scenario is a realistic simulation of future tasks and responsibilities
for graduates when they are heading IT management, because end-user training becomes
more important for IT management.
During the course, the students had to manage various tasks, like recognizing goals and
approaches in teaching the Internet, identifying detailed training needs of the target groups,
developing training methods and a teaching program, organizing the environment, designing
an evaluation performance survey, and finally, conducting the training acting as teachers of
the school.
As the discussions with the participants of “S3: Senior Surf School” and the empirical
results show, the students were able to improve the level of competence of the older people
in handling and using the Internet. Additionally, they received excellent grades on all
dimensions and positive feedback referring to items like atmosphere, organization, help, and
support. At the end of the school, all participants were happy and would recommend the
school to others.
Besides these direct results, the special setting of the “S3: Senior Surf School” provoked
some “strange” situations and curious observations:
