Just because technical writing is part of your job, it doesn’t mean that you received the proper training. It may be that it was a new element added to your job or that you took it over from someone else. And while you may be good at it, taking a technical writing course will ensure that you excel at technical writing.
Taking a technical writing course can help you hone your writing skills when it comes to technical and scientific writing. You’ll learn how to write concisely so that your documents aren’t longer and more drawn out than needed. You’ll learn how to decide what information to include and what information to leave out. You’ll also learn how to make your documents readable, which is different from making them concise. You want to make sure that people can understand your documents. This isn’t about “dumbing-down” the information: it’s about writing in a way that people will be able to understand what you’re saying. And by making it readable, you will also be making your technical documents engaging. This means that not only can your readers understand what you’re saying, but they want to KNOW what you’re saying.
And you have the choice of taking the class on-site or online, which gives you unbelievable flexibility. If you can’t take the time to take the course on site, then you can work away at it online, still receiving the same level of support. You can also choose the depth of your course, ranging from one to four days. Taught by professionals, the course will be a combination of lectures, group work and assignments.
So even if you already write technical documents, taking a course can help. It will sharpen your skills and ensure that you are at the top of your game.
Online education was reviewed three years ago preceded by Oscar Wilde’s quotation “The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever”. My intention was to amuse, rather than to denigrate online education, although the conclusions reached in the literature at that time about its success were mixed. This special issue comprises a number of articles mainly from people working in various parts of the world; content and technology are nicely balanced.
You will notice that there is a noticeable trend towards getting to grips with the difficult but essential matter of evaluation discussed by Merisotis and Phipps. James Merisotis and Ronald Phipps are senior staff members of the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington.
There seem to be roughly equal number of enthusiasts and skeptics so the conclusions of Merisotis and Phipps are unsurprising. During their review they unearthed “several hundred articles, papers, and dissertations” and list what they consider to be the shortcomings of research on the subject. They believe that “more emphasis has been placed on the Utopian possibilities of the technology and its potential to do as well as classroom-based instruction, but not enough pragmatism has been applied to allow for a discussion of online education’s practical implications as a supplement to enhance teaching and learning”. They also believe that technology can “leverage faculty time but it cannot replace most human contact without significant quality losses”.
Gordon Joyes and Rachel Scott from the Centre for Teaching Enhancement at the University of Nottingham write about the inadequacies of teachers. They are commenting on a ten-university European project called SteelCAL. New learning technologies are not effectively “embedded in the day to day practice of learning and teaching in most higher educational institutions… the main reason is that many academics have had no training and little experience in the use of communications and information technology as an educational tool”. Note that Joyes and Scott mention under “Full Evaluation” that they are comparing “the effectiveness of SteelCAL with an experimental group of students to a matched control group who are taught traditionally”. It will be interesting to hear exactly how they do it. As they say this exercise is “difficult to organize”.
Dr. Martin Oliver, a member of the higher education research and development unit at University College, London, describes the difficulties of evaluating online teaching and learning. In talking about the importance of evaluation he says: “The drive to evaluate has not been matched by support and training for the practitioners who are supposed to carry out these processes”. He concludes that the issues raised in his article “represent only the starting point for an ongoing discourse on the evaluation of online learning and teaching”.
Anthony Rosie’s article is about his experience covering “meaningful engagement and the enjoyment of learning” following the ideas developed by Biggs who suggests that “Relational knowledge involves students in developing systems of interconnection between concepts and learning approaches with teaching as a contributor to this linkage”.
Bernard Scott from the Centre of Educational Technology at De Montfort University talks about the CASTE system for course design and the matter of “conversations” between system and student. Scott was associated with Gordon Pask who died in 1996 and was regarded as a founding father of Cybernetics. The Web of Science shows that Pask’s 1976 book about Conversation Theory has been cited 66 times since it was published. CASTE is being used at De Montford as part of a master’s level program in learning and teaching.
Diana Thompson and Garry Homer are situated at the University of Wolverhampton which is also active at other sites in Shropshire notably at the new town of Telford. Wolverhampton and Telford are two of the few large towns in one of the most rural counties in England with a widely dispersed population mainly engaged in agriculture. The authors describe the way in which IT training is carried out at all levels for people in the county.
Mr. M.J. Wood is the enterprising head teacher of a Maidstone secondary school which recently won an award for its Web site. He is under no illusions about what has to be done “on a scale of 1 to 20 for measuring the potential use of IT in teaching and learning. I would not be confident to place us beyond point 1″. He comments on the climate of opinion at home: “If parents realize that there is a shortage of text books in a school they will be quick to complain but as yet they see access to computers as a luxury. One of our teachers recently discovered that 24 pupils out of a teaching group of 25 have access to the Internet at home. I suspect that one Christmas in the near future our pupils’ stockings will be filled with cheap hand-held devices which, among other features, will provide Internet access”.
As general wisdom goes, the more education an individual has, the more he or she might expect to earn. For the most part, for instance, a college or university graduate with a bachelor’s degree might expect to earn more than the graduate with an associate’s degree, the graduate with a master’s degree more than the graduate with a bachelor’s degree and so on.
There are exceptions, however, and they have to do in part with the occupation as well as the individual. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that students with associate’s degrees who go on to work as dental hygienists, nuclear technicians, computer specialists, fashion designers and radiation therapists on average earn between $62,600 to $68,600 a year. A social worker with a bachelor’s degree, on the other hand, might earn $45,000 a year even with 15 years of experience, Payscale.com shows.
Some wondered for a time also whether the type of college or university – Ivy league institutions that tend to cost more, for instance – produce higher paid graduates. A Payscale.com survey published in the New York Times in 2009 suggested that graduates of engineering schools were paid the highest starting salaries, while Ivy League graduates earned more at mid-career. College and university majors made a difference: Those who earned engineering, economics, math and science degrees earned some of the top 20 highest paid starting and mid-career median salaries, the Payscale.com survey showed. In Florida, community college graduates with associate’s degrees were also found to earn higher entry-level salaries than those who obtained bachelor’s degrees from public and private colleges and universities.
The Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times on Jan. 4 didn’t single out individual institutions but showed that, in general, students graduating with bachelor’s degrees from Florida’s public and private universities in 2009 were provided average starting salaries respectively of $36,552 and $44,558 annually as compared with the $47,708 that students graduating with associate’s degrees in science from community colleges earned. Students with bachelor’s degrees over time, however, might expect to earn more based on their potential for advancements in the workplace, the article noted.
At least one expert in The Herald and St. Petersburg Times suggested also that community colleges tend to train students for in-demand careers in areas such as nursing, dental assisting and auto collision repair. “Green collar” jobs also are said to be experiencing increased demand. In Toledo, a university as well as a community college are offering associate’s degrees in alternative energy, according to a Jan. 18 report in Toledo on the Move. The associate’s degree programs would train students in developing, installing and maintaining alternative energy systems, the Toledo on the Move article noted.
In Worcester County, Mass., community colleges might see increased enrollment as a result of new sheriff’s department hiring policies. The News Telegram on Jan. 20 reported on a new requirement that sheriff’s department employees either have associate’s degrees or two years of experience in the military. The county sheriff centered some of his new hiring policies on those that other sheriff’s departments in the state already have in place, the News Telegram noted.
Many two-year colleges are also collaborating more often with four-year institutions in their area. The Orlando Business Journal on Jan. 19 noted that a two-year associate’s degree in architecture was part of a new partnership that took students on to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture at a university in Florida. Students in Pennsylvania who obtain an associate’s degree from community colleges in the area are able to apply all of their academic credits toward fulfilling Allentown college’s general education requirements in instances where they enroll in the institution’s School of Adult and Graduate Education, according to a Jan. 20 article in The Morning Call. In Tennessee, a community college and a technical university have established a “dual admissions” program partnership where students are offered a more structured means of completing an associate’s degree at the community college and moving on to a bachelor’s degree program at the technical university, a Jan. 19 article on knoxnews.com noted.