As part of a R20 million IT Education Project, the Education & Support department within National Data Systems (NDS), a member of the Bytes Technology Group, has won a R600 000 contract to provide technical training to teachers.
This is done on a national basis and will assist and teach them how to manage a small network in each of their schools. It also covers management of e-mail and the Internet.
"The idea of this training is that the candidates will then go back to their schools and train their own users on all aspects of the Internet, e-mail, basic PC administration, how to operate different applications as well as how to troubleshoot their own systems," says Frederick van Niekerk, team leader, Education & Support at NDS.
The project, which is managed by SchoolNet SA, forms part of ThinTana, a consortium of Telkom`s strategic equity partners - SBC International and Telekom Malaysia. Their commitment was to invest R120 million from 1997 to 2002 on a series of educational programmes that will improve technology learning and bring future generations into a knowledge-based society.
The project that NDS is specifically involved with is known as the ThinTana i-learning project and the Telkom SuperCenter project. The project involves 300 schools across SA and a large number of learners will enter the information age, in a project touted as the African continent`s largest privately funded information technology education initiative.
NDS has been commissioned to supply training to teachers within the Telkom SuperCenters and the ThinTana centres. This involves providing technical training to two teachers per school of which there are approximately 10 schools per venue. Three venues are catered for at any one time with about 20 to 30 candidates attending each course. NDS supplies two instructors per site and a total of six instructors in total.
Candidates, who know very little and in some cases nothing at all, are given training on the basics of computers right up to a level of becoming network administrators, in a record time of two days. The reference material is thorough and complete and contains step-by-step guidelines on how to progress, therefore making for easy understanding. It is probably due to the completeness of the manual that the training is achievable within the two-day time period.
The manual has been compiled is such a way that it is referred to extensively during the course, therefore making candidates more familiar with its contents. There is an enormous amount of information to cover in two days, but due to continuous reference always being made to the manual, candidates are quite comfortable, that should they need to refer back to it after the course, they will be familiar and comfortable with its contents.
Training commenced on 2 and 3 July and is due for completion by 10 and 11 November and in that time approximately 600 people will have been trained. Acceptance of the training has been excellent.
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