
           Survey of Network Training Materials
                           and
               Assessment of Requirements
                          Reports

          ITTI Network Training Materials Project
                    Computing Service
             University of Newcastle upon Tyne

                         January 1993

                
TABLE OF CONTENTS

1  Background to Survey 
1.1  Collection of network training materials   
1 1.2 Types of network training material
2  Survey results
2.1  Survey results - UK
2.1.1  Reference guides
2.1.1.1  Reference guides - general users       
2.1.1.2  Reference guides - specific users      
2.1.1.3  Reference guides - specific services
2.1.2  Training material
2.1.2.1  Training material - general
2.1.2.2  Training material - specific services
2.1.2.3  Training material - specific users
2.1.2.4  Libraries and training
2.1.3  Supplementary materials
2.1.4 Format of materials
2.2  Survey results - United States
2.3  Survey results - Europe
2.4  Survey results - Australia

3  ASSESSMENT OF REQUIREMENTS
3.1  General network training materials
3.2  Case study
3.3  Subject-related training
3.4  Format
3.5.  Archiving
4  Summary


             Survey of Training Materials: Report  


1  Background to Survey
The aim of the Network Training Materials Project is to develop a set of
training materials to facilitate the provision of network training by UK
university user support staff, and also to provide some materials for
self-paced learning by end-users. These materials will be adaptable to
different local computing environments, to different subject interests, and
to varying levels of user expertise. They will also cater for a variety of
training situations, such as stand-up presentations with live or simulated
demonstrations of networked services, hands-on workshops, and independent
learning by users. 
The approach of the Project in this task has been to draw on already
existing training material wherever possible, thus optimising the
investment that the community has already made in this area, and enabling
the Project to be more ambitious in developing training materials than
would otherwise be the case. 

1.1  Collection of network training materials
The first stage of the Network Training Materials Project, therefore, has
included collecting and examining currently available network training
materials in order to identify material which might be incorporated,
adapted or otherwise built on, for inclusion in the Network Training Pack.
Requests for existing material were sent out through the Project's own
electronic mailing list, itti-networks, which was announced and promoted
widely. Requests were also made through other established lists, such as
the UK Mailbase training group of lists, WG-ISUS, and the US list -
nettrain. Requests were sent to university computing centres, to bulletin
boards and conferences, and appropriate mailing lists were monitored for
information on training materials. At the end of Phase 1 of the Project, a
fair number of network training documents have been collected, providing
the Project with an overview of the range of training which is currently
being offered, as well as with potentially useful material for adaptation
and inclusion in its Training Pack.

1.2 Types of network training material
For analysing the survey results, it is useful to group the different types
of network training material. Material collected falls into a few broad
classes. 
A) Reference guides - These explain the basics of the topic, provide
definitions, give command sequences, etc.
B) Training materials - These guide the user through 
the topic, or direct the learning process in a 
systematic way.
C) Supplementary information - Information which may be useful and
interesting but which is not, in practice, essential. Although 'training
material' is the main focus of interest in this Project, 'reference guides'
and 'supplementary information' are also of interest. They will in many
cases provide the raw material for the development of training material,
and may also serve as backup documentation. 

2  Survey results
'Training material', as defined above, is only a minor proportion of what
was collected. More abundant are reference guides of various sorts -
handbooks, leaflets and reference cards and the like. Most include
instructions and commands specific to the local system/s. There are a fair
number of reference guides which deal with networking comprehensively,
while 'training' material, on the other hand, is usually associated with a
specific course, user group or service. A few examples of self-teaching
material take a general approach. The class, 'supplementary information'
includes the 'optional extras' of network training and documentation. 

2.1  Survey results - UK
>From the UK, the great bulk of the material collected was of the 'reference
guide' type. 

2.1.1  Reference guides
2.1.1.1  Reference guides - general users
Guides on network services and/or specific network facilities such as file
transfer or e-mail have been produced by the universities of Aberdeen,
Central Lancashire, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Stirling and Ulster. These
guides usually include basic explanations of the facilities offered by the
network, cover essential  procedural aspects of networking (commands etc.),
and most give details of a selection of (usually UK) network services, e.g.
NISS (National Information on Software and Services), HENSA (Higher
Education National Software Archive), BIDS (Bath ISI Data Service), etc.
Only a couple of the more recently written items include a mention of
networked information retrieval (NIR) tools. All include instruction
specific to local systems, though often this is minimal. It is noteworthy
that most authors have tried to keep the language as non technical as
possible. 
The ultimate general reference document for technical accuracy is the Joint
Network Team's JANET Starter Pack and also its JANET Starter Card. The
Starter Pack is intended as a reference guide for computing service staff
to consult or adapt for their own local documentation and its influence is
obvious in some of the guides produced. It is not intended for end-users,
being rather technical in emphasis, and with much information only relevant
to computing service staff. 

Included with general reference guides is one of the rare examples of UK
material in non-traditional format. This is the JANET Hypercard Tour, an
interactive hypercard-based guide to the JANET network, in form derivative
of the US Internet Tour from the NSF Network Service Centre, but in content
intended to replicate interactively the JANET Starter Pack. The JANET
product is, at this stage (Jan. 1993) still in the beta stage and not
generally available, but still provides the Project with a useful example
of disk-based  material on the network.

2.1.1.2  Reference guides - specific users
There are some examples of reference guides for specific user groups,
namely the Royal Greenwich Observatory's "Electronic Mail Directory"
written for astronomers, Project Jupiter's "Guide for Libraries on JANET",
and specialist reference cards, one for social scientists put out by the
ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council) for social scientists, and one
for librarians issued by JUGL (JANET User Group for Libraries). With the
current NISP (Networked Information Services Project) project and its
support for non-traditional user groups, we can expect to see more of this
class of material.

2.1.1.3  Reference guides - specific services
Many of the JANET services provide documentation for users. For example
NISP/Mailbase maintains an impressive body of on-line and paper
documentation on the Mailbase service. NISS have pocket guides about
NISS-BB, NISSPAC, NISS and 
the NISS Gateway. BIDS also has a pocket User Guide. BIRON (Bibliographic
Information Retrieval ON-line - the ESRC Data Archive) produces a User
Guide booklet, and Lancaster University have produced one for the National
Public Domain Software Archive (now HENSA). 

2.1.2  Training material
Only a small amount of training material written for users in general was
made available. Mostly, it was focused either on a specific network
service, or a specific group of trainees. 

2.1.2.1  Training material - general
The few examples of general use training material produced by computing
services were self-instructional material. Sheffield have produced course
notes and exercises on using electronic mail and on network services on
JANET, while Newcastle Computing Service have a printed guide for new users
to work through, with hands-on examples.

2.1.2.2  Training material - specific services
The service-specific material collected provides some useful prototypes for
future training materials. Material includes the Mailbase Tutorial for the
On-line Service and the the BIDS (Bath/ISI Data Service) Instruction Pack.
The Mailbase Tutorial is a self-teaching guide, on paper, with work-through
examples using the Mailbase on-line interactive service. The BIDS
Instruction Pack provides a comprehensive set of materials for training
sessions on the BIDS/ISI service. It covers different levels of searching,
includes notes for presenters, OHP masters, handout masters, and a training
disk with sample database. It provides the Project with an excellent model
of multi format, multi-purpose training material. It is complemented by a
Self-Help Guide booklet designed around a series of typical questions about
using the BIDS service.

2.1.2.3  Training material - specific users Trainee-specific material
included the sets of workshop exercises  from NISP - one set prepared for a
workshop for COSINE group leaders, the other for the JUGL  conference.
There were a number of other instances of training material aimed at
library groups, such as the workshop material for library staff from
Liverpool and from Northumbria, the Project Jupiter Training Pack, and
tutorial material on bibliographic searching on the network from
Southampton. 

2.1.2.4  Libraries and training
It is worth noting that while computing user support staff play a major
role in the field of network training, the degree of library participation
both in delivery and uptake of training is considerable and may well
increase as librarians take a more active interest in promoting awareness
of networked resources. Librarians maintain a high profile as network users
through the representations of JUGL, one of the few JANET user groups apart
from the regional groups. Members of JUGL have offered network training to
ad hoc library groups for the last six years, work which was carried on
later in a more formal capacity by its brainchild, Project Jupiter, set up
to provide network training for librarians on a national scale. For all
these reasons, it is not surprising that the libraries should feature to
some extent in a survey related to network training.

2.1.3  Supplementary materials
Notable examples amongst the material seen were the articles for the Kings
College newsletter dealing with broad networking topics such as protocols
and standards, intended more for the interested user than for someone
seeking basic guidance. 

Resource guides, also, can properly be seen as supplementary material. One
well-established and maintained resource guide is the University of
Sussex's library on-line catalogues list. A recent entrant is the list of
on-line information systems from the University of East Anglia, being
updated monthly and accessible on the NISS bulletin board. 

There do not, as yet, appear to be many UK subject resource guides
generally available, but as librarians and subject specialists begin to
realise the potential of the network as a source of information, we may
expect to see more of this type of 'added value' material appearing.

2.1.4  Format of materials
The dominant format for UK network training and reference material is
paper, with electronic availability being provided, if at all, as an
afterthought. This Project has initiated the on-line placement of a number
of items made available to it in the itti-networks directory on Mailbase. A
few files can also be found on BUBL (Bulletin Board for Libraries). 

Paper-based material includes spiral-bound booklets, leaflets, reference
cards, loose-leaf sheets in a ring binder, and some of the training
materials include OHP masters intending for copying. 
Only a few items, the JANET Hypercard Tour, the astronomers' e-mail guide,
and the BIDS Instruction Pack, are made available in the first place in
formats other than paper, and in the case of the BIDS Instruction Pack, the
disk which contains the mini ISI database for workshop use is a minor part
of the paper whole . The astronomers guide is primarily available
electronically over the network as a LateX file, but is intended to be
printed out. The JANET Hypercard Tour is the one true example of
non-traditional format, and at this stage (Jan.1993) even that is not
generally available. Altogether, UK network training materials are fairly
traditional in format.

2.2  Survey results - United States
Network training appears to play a much larger part in the US than it has
so far done in the UK and a substantial number of network training
materials have been collected by the Project. In the spirit of sharing, a
large number of training documents are made available by trainers in ftp
directories. Announcements are sent to the relevant mailing lists, e.g.
net-train, and other trainers are free to pick up this material and adapt
it to suit their own site. 

Currently there is also a good stock of published literature to back up
training programmes.  Some of notable recent titles include Zen and the Art
of the Internet, 2nd ed. (Kehoe), Crossing the Internet Threshold (Tennant,
Ober, Lipow), Hitchhikers' Guide to the Internet (Krol), Ecolinking
(Rittner), Whole Internet User's Guide and catalog (Krol ), Internet Primer
(Lane and Summerhill), Internet Guide for New Users (Dern), Internet
companion (LaQuey.). Some new journals on networking have also started
publication (Electronic Networking).
Some wide-scale impetus has been given to network training through a number
of notable training events, such as the NSFNet seminars and workshops at
Merit, the three day event at the CECC (California Educational Computing
Consortium) Computing workshops '91 ("Mining the Internet"), the one day
workshop "Beyond the Walls" at Syracuse University, and a couple of
internationally subscribed e-mail courses ("Navigating the Internet").

There is also a willingness to apply imaginative new approaches to
training. The use of competition and quiz as training tools has had some
recent popularity. These methods can be used in workshops e.g. Mining the
Internet at CECC '91, a prototype of a board game - "The LAN That Time
Forgot" at the Net '92 conference in Washington D, and also lend themselves
well to electronic mail distribution. The series of Internet Hunts (Rick
Gates' list of quiz questions solved by using the network) beginning late
1992 is an example of the format. 
Notable in the body of US material is the use of metaphor to explain the
Internet, for instance the Internet is represented as the ocean on which
the user may take a cruise, or as a building in which there are different
rooms for different purposes, as a mine from which valuable nuggets may be
extracted. 

Also notable in comparison with the UK is the abundance of resource lists,
such as the substantial Internet Resource Guide, lists by John December and
Dana Noonan (NNews, sponsored by Metronet),  NYSERNet "New User's Guide".
Some resource lists are updated regularly and have become standard source
material for network training, e.g. the weekly list by Scott Yanoff. Lists
of subject resources are also being made available, e.g. Not Just Cows
(agriculture), and special lists such as of library OPACs (St. George,
Barron) and electronic mailing lists (Kovacs). 

The US material surveyed includes some good examples of training with
formats other than printed documents. These include a video illustrating a
case study of network use by a hypothetical professor of English literature
whose specialist area of study is the works of Lewis Carroll (Beyond the
Walls). The idea of an illustrative case study as part of a training
package is an excellent one and could well be adopted for the Project's
Training Pack.

Another notable US model is the animation package, the Cruise of the
Internet from Merit - now available for both PC and Apple Mac, and also
available in Spanish as El Cruso. This interactive colour package shows an
attractively presented sample of each of the major network facilities
(e-mail, telnet, ftp, and NIR tools) with illustrations of network services
to which they give access. It can be used as a visual complement to
presentations, or by the user as self-paced learning. 
The Hypercard Tour of the Internet gives a hypertext exploration of
Internet services and is also a suitable tool for self-paced learning by
the individual user.

2.3  Survey results - Europe
The RARE Technical Report "User Support and Information Services in the
RARE Community" (Ed. Jill Foster, 1st ed. March 1992) gives details of user
support, documentation and training within each European country. What it
indicates is that most countries provide network user guides, usually in
their own language only. Only a small number of European materials was
collected by the Project. One of these was the beautifully produced Spanish
network guide (Servicio de Informacion y Atencion a Usuarios) and the other
was the very comprehensive and well written SURFnet Guide. The European
directory service -Paradise - provides good high standard documentation (in
English), and the European information service, CONCISE, does likewise.

Another example of the use of video was a European product - the COSINE
(Co-operation for Open Systems Interconnection Networking in Europe)
training video. This short promotional video, developed with Macromind
Director, conveys the message about COSINE through animation.

2.4  Survey results - Australia
The Project was fortunate to be able to exchange information and collect
training materials from Australian trainers at first hand. What was
apparent was that the network training scene there was very active in some
areas, and a lot of good training material had been, and was being,
produced.  Some of this training material is being made available on-line
in the network training archives at Murdoch University and the Australian
National University. 

The Queensland University of Technology and AARNet have produced a detailed
and well-written  information booklet on using the network, in both Unix
and Vax/VMS versions. The University of Newcastle have produced a booklet
to complement their training sessions, with substantial emphasis on
hands-on experience of network services. This booklet also is available in
operating-system-specific editions. 
A key influence in the current active Australian programme of network
training has been the series of workshops given by the AARNet Project Team
from the University of Newcastle Library at a number of universities in the
eastern states.  This team have made their PC-based slideshow which
accompanies their presentations freely available to other trainers. It is
available for retrieval in the Murdoch archive.

Some subject based programmes of training have been developed. For
instance, at Newcastle, training specifically for medics has been organised
and the accompanying documentation has been made available to the Project.
The University of Technology, Sydney, have produced material for each of
the one-day training workshops for the schools of architecture, computing
science, education, nursing therapeutics, and the library. The material
includes subject tailored lists of network resources. Training material
encompasses tools such as Gopher and WAIS. In contrast to the UK, most of
the Australian materials included a section on Usenet News.


3  ASSESSMENT OF REQUIREMENTS 

3.1  General network training materials
One of the major gaps observed in this survey of training materials relates
to general network training material produced in the UK. Coverage in this
area is very scanty (see 2.1.2.1) at present, so it is appropriate that
most of the planned components of the Training Pack should be general
training materials on network use, covering the major facilities such as
file transfer, e-mail, remote login - with illustration of the services to
which they give access. It is notable that most of the UK materials seen,
perhaps because of their age, do not deal with the new Networked
Information Retrieval (NIR) tools. The Training Pack should certainly
correct this deficiency.
Taken overall, the survey has shown that there is a considerable body of
general reference material to draw on in writing the training material. It
provides the Project with what is in effect a reference library of
materials on the full range of networking topics. The database of training
materials assembled by the Project (using FileMaker Pro on an Apple Mac)
will allow for retrieval by subject and other manipulations.

While the general material may well be purpose-written for the Training
Pack, there is considerable scope for absorbing existing materials which
deal with specific services, e.g. material on BIDS, Mailbase, BIRON, HENSA,
etc. Also, some of the material for specific groups of users could be
absorbed into general training material - the NISP workshop exercises are a
case in point.  

3.2  Case study
All the feedback which the Project has had suggests that motivational tools
such as illustrative case studies, are a desirable element in training. The
video "Beyond the Walls" is an example of such a case study, but because of
its strong U.S. and BITNET bias, is not particularly suitable for use in
training of JANET users. This raises the question of producing a similar UK
video. This Project's initial budget did not allow for video production,
but should extra funding become available, it is recommended that such a
production be investigated as a first priority. 

3.3  Subject-related training
Also relevant to motivation is the use of subject-related training. The
most notable development of user-specific training seen was in Australia.
Training materials frequently included subject-based lists of resources. To
enable trainers to compile these for themselves and to allow adaptation of
general training materials for specific disciplines should be provided for
in the Training Pack. As NIR tools increase in sophistication, users and
trainers will be able to discover subject-specific resources more easily,
and the Training Pack may well be able to take advantage of these
developments.

3.4  Format
Format of materials should provide for a variety of training situations,
from stand-up presentation to self-instruction. These will include OHP
masters, disk-based storyboard shows, presentation notes for trainers,
handouts for trainees, back-up reference documentation, workshop exercises,
computer-based training material.
Attractive presentation is considered an important factor in motivation,
particular for inexperienced and naive users. The Cruise of the Internet
provides an example of one option which could be explored in preparing
visual complements to presentations. At the very least, well designed and
graphically illustrated slides should be available. As well as self-paced
paper-based materials, we would also look closely at the two Hypercard
Tours as possible models for our own materials.

3.5.  Archiving
As much as possible of the materials in the Training Pack should be made
available on-line. At this stage, the itti-networks directory provides an
obvious site for this repository. The Project has been collaborating with
De Stanton at the Murdoch University Library, where the experimental gopher
lists a Network Training Materials option, with sub-options for Australia
and the UK (itti-networks directory). Both archives are likely to use the
same cataloguing system for listings. The Project has been collaborating
with TopNode in the US on working out a standard fields list, and this is
likely to be adopted by Murdoch also.

4  Summary
The survey has provided a useful overview of the types of training
materials available, has suggested directions for content and format which
the Project might adopt in preparing its own training materials, and in
some cases, has shown the Project the traps which it must avoid falling
into. These relate to style of presentation, use of language, consistency
of format with content, and content itself - particularly related to the
expectations and requirements of users. The Training Pack must therefore
seek to adopt the best, avoid the worst, and maintain a consistent and
clear style of presentation, which is adaptable to subject specific and
level-specific needs. Above all, it needs to keep the broad objectives of
the training in mind, viz. to enable users to use the network, to give them
the information they will need for effective use, and to show them how
using the network will benefit them. 


Margaret Isaacs
Project Officer
25 Jan. 1993

