From: Greg Bothun, Chair, Ed. Tech. Committee
Re: Initiation of A Student Apprenticeship Program
The Educational Technology Committee proposes the initiation of a student apprenticeship program to serve as an extension of the support currently provided by Microcomputer Services and Network Services, at the Computing Center. There is a critical campus need for support of the computer network on a departmental or college basis. Under this program, undergraduates will be trained by the existing staff at the Computing Center for a period of 2-3 months. After this time, these students will form a cadre that will be available to assist individual departments over an extended period of time. The primary training and expertise of these students will be cross-platform support of network connectivity. This effort would substantially increase the level of support that can be provided by Network Services. In addition, the students will learn valuable skills that will greatly increase their chances of future employment. Indeed, many former student workers in Network Services are employed in the same capacity by local area businesses and schools.
We estimate the total cost for the 1995-1996 academic year to be $50,000. Of this amount, $25K can come from the remaining carryover Ed Tech funds but the remaining $25K will have to come from other University Funds. This funding level will allow the program to enroll 6 students for a period of 10 months. We believe this program is vital if we are to alleviate the resource limited environment we are in. Students are the cheapest form of labor that we have. If more and more instructors move toward integrating network into the curriculum, even if its just e-mail discussions with students, there will be a need for cross platform support of network connectivity. We want to get a head start on this by initiating this student apprentice program. A capsule summary of the program is given below.
1. The students will be trained for a period of 2--3 months by Network Services personnel so that they have a thorough understanding of network topology and connectivity issues. These students will then become the first point of contact for the department should there be network related problems. This will alleviate a far too common communication problem on campus as there will be expertise on the other end of the Network Services hotline.
2. These trained students will be assigned to a single department or perhaps a collection of departments if they are physically proximate. The assignments will be done by the Ed. Technology committee after assessing the needs of individual departments based on their feedback to the committee.
3. While the spirit of this apprenticeship program is like that of the Learn N Earn program we believe it is much more focussed and it alleviates the cost share requirement which means that all departments can receive benefit. In fact, the principle motivation of this program from the Educational Technology Resource Fee point of few is to get trained students into those departments that can not afford the cost share requirement. This at least raises the probability that all departments can receive some sort of network connectivity support.
Our initial funding model is to provide 25K for this program from carry over Educational technology resource fee money and have the additional 25K come from other University sources. This program provides a direct response to the students using their dollars, and the people enrolled in the program will probably have careers waiting for them. Ultimately we would like to ramp up this program to include more students, but 6 students in the 1995-96 academic year is a modest and acheivable goal. Moreover, this proposed program should be sufficiently flexible to accomodate the training of students that might be paid for by individual departmental dollars. Informal conversations with some department chairs indicate that they would be willing to spend the money to have Network Services train their students who would then be re-assigned back to that department. This means of cost share potentially enlarges the scope of student participation.
If you agree with this proposal and the funds can be located, we respectfully request that the proposal be forwarded to Joanne Hugi, Computing Center Director, so that her staff can plan to carry out the necessary training. We hope that action on this can be swift, as we would like to identify students and begin their training early in this term.
Thank you for your consideration.