Main aims and objectives of the project:

• Establish the Arts Faculty E-Squad as a permanent fixture within the faculty, funded by participating departments (and other funds where appropriate).
• Extend the E-Squad with at least one student from each department.
• Research and report on the issues involved in students (digital natives) transferring skills and understanding to staff. A report will be submitted to the ALT-J journal, and a paper proposed for the Shock of the Old 7 conference at Oxford University (in 2008 the conference will focus on the concept of ‘digital natives’).
• Develop a transferable model for such student-staff support teams, so that they may easily be established by other faculties, departments and services. This will be presented at showcasing events throughout the university.
• Develop a training programme, delivered online and in class, to enable future students to quickly obtain the required skills (technical, communicational, pedagogical etc).
• Develop a means for recording and reporting upon the personal development and work experience of each E-Squad member.

Description of the project

The Arts Faculty has established a team of nine students, able to support staff across the faculty in basic to intermediate level e-learning technologies: the Arts E-Squad. Four of these students are funded through WUAP work/study, and five through Unitemps (paid by individual departments). We hope to extend the technical capabilities of these students throughout the year, with training and mentoring provided by the Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor (a PGCE qualified IT teacher). As such, they provide a human resource capable of responding to tasks specified by staff through an online request form. Feedback from current E-Squad activities has highlighted the usefulness of this model, but also that it is often advantageous for the staff member to be supported by a student from their own department. Furthermore, many departments already have their own WUAP and Unitemp students who would benefit from the support and training offered by the E-Squad. However, such an expansion of the current E-Squad will require some time spent upon developing systems and support to ensure scalability is possible, hence the need for extra funding to allow this development to occur while the E-Squad is in operation (with an administrator from one of the departments temporarily running the day-to-day activities).

The initiative also has a more ambitious intention: to see a transfer of skills and understanding from E-Squad students to the staff that they support. This is in part a response to the very considerable challenge of encouraging and enabling the uptake of new technologies across the whole faculty, with every member of staff, at every point in the IT capability scale, advancing.

In this way, we hope to enable digitally immigrant staff to consider using IT in ways that are closer to the patterns of use already prevalent amongst the digitally native students that they teach. For example, when creating an online learning activity, the E-Squad provides the capability to test and evaluate that activity from a student perspective. This second strand of the project would seem more difficult than simply providing a team to complete tasks as they arise. We are proposing to undertake a research project alongside the running of the E-Squad, in order to understand and adapt to the issues implicated in this student to staff support model. This research project will contribute to the development of the E-Squad, the description of a transferable model for other faculties, as well as our wider understanding of task of bringing staff into the digital-online world. Again this will require administrative assistance to run the E-Squad alongside the completion of the research strand.