Education Roundup: £1,000 for tech students?

St Andrews University gets remote IT support

With a large campus spread over several locations, St Andrews University faced problems with IT support: technicians could spend 20 minutes walking to a building, ten minutes fixing a problem, and then another twenty minutes walking back. While the university said one upside was fit support staff, it meant a quick fix took nearly an hour to complete.

Now, the Fife-based university has implemented a remote support system from Avanquest called Netviewer, which lets support staff solve most issues from their home department by allowing remote access to PCs across the school.

Lorraine Brown, the university's IT helpdesk manager, said: "Avanquest's solution has made a huge difference on how we manage our time on the helpdesk. A support instruction telephone call which could take 30 minutes previously can now be completed in five minutes and lengthy support visits have been reduced to as little as five to 10 minutes."

New IT for trainee teachers

Teachers being trained by the Jewish Primary Schools Consortium (JPSC) can now track their education from anywhere at anytime - while cutting back on paperwork, too.

The JPSC has deployed Vantage Technologies' Paragon, a web-based continuous professional development tool, which lets trainee teachers create an e-portfolio of their work for mentors to check.

Jeffrey Leader, director of education at the JPSC, said: "We chose this tool because of its flexibility and ease of use. Paragon's internet-based approach is very effective, and goes a long way in helping to reduce the amount of paperwork required.... Paragon not only benefits the trainees, it also gives mentors a clearer picture of trainees' progress."

And one trainee teacher said: "The tool was good and clear to use, it was really helpful to have a system accessible online rather than having to deal with lots of paperwork and I have found the e-profile an excellent way of monitoring my progress."

CBI calls for cash for science and tech students

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has called for a £1,000 annual bursary to be given to all students in fields such as science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

Richard Lambert, CBI's director-general, said: "Many science, engineering and technology companies are heavily engaged in efforts to attract more young people into science, but we face a huge challenge and business has to do more...Bursaries towards the cost of degrees which are most useful to the economy could kick-start thousands of young people into reconsidering a future in science. A thousand pounds a year towards tuition fees, combined with a better-paying job at the end, could see STEM graduates clearing their student loans years earlier."

Graham Love, chief executive of global defence technology and security business QinetiQ, said: "STEM skills are vital to our commercial success and should be of great concern to us all because they underpin our ability to tackle some of the greatest global challenges we face. At QinetiQ we have seen the number of applications per graduate vacancy halve in the last five years and concerns about future skill levels resonate across the defence and aerospace sector."

Email to a friend

Print this page

Social Bookmark this article: What is this?

Digg

Delicious

Reddit

StumbleUpon

Slashdot

Google

Facebook