Technical documents designed to fit the beginner: a recursive process

Beginning users come from various backgrounds and have different needs for documentation. At the University of Colorado at Denver, the nontraditional students are targeted for distace learning opportunities because of their need to balance career obligations with schoolwork, but these students do not always have the computing skills that they need to use the technology used to deliver the coursework. As technical support personnel, we keep the computers running and keep the users up to speed on how to use the technology. Sometimes, the best way to create a good document is to begin with user feedback, and continue to hone the content as your analysis of the user and the user’s circumstances develops. Offered here are strategies for developing documentation in real-time. Introduction At the University of Colorado at Denver, a need arose for more electronic support of face to face classes. The reasons for turning to electronic support for the traditional face to face classroom experience are numerous. Some faculty wish to make access to the course materials easier, some want to minimize time spent in class on the mundane task of hard-copy distribution. Some administrators want to tap new markets in geographically or temporally isolated populations for college programs. At this university, we have always served the nontraditional student. The average student ,age is 28. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise. to reoublish. to post on servers. or to redistribute to Ms. requires prior specific per&ion and/or a fee. 01998 ACM l-Sall?-OO4-X/98/0009 $5.00 Over 50% of the students on campus are graduate students. There are no residence facilities and the campus is located in the heart of Denver. Most students work either part time or full time while pursuing an education. These students are especially suited to a course-delivery method that takes into account their difficulty with showing up on campus regularly. Or are they? For the most part, we think of college students as technologically adept, having cut their teeth on computer technology and at ease with programming the VCR. But what about the nontraditional student? These are adults taking courses in the evening, while the real concerns of family, career, and budget are foremost in their thoughts. These are the people supposedly so well-suited to taking advantage of distance education, because they do not have time to meet in a traditional classroom on a traditional campus. But do they have the expertise? These students do not have the leisure hours to devote to catching up on the latest technology. Most do not have the funds to continually upgrade their personal computers, as the marketplace has rendered four-year-old technology obsolete. With the promise of a college education comes the double hurdle of catching up to technology in addition to mastering the subject material. CU Virtual: Technology The technology that the students are using to access their course materials is a piece of groupware that we have customized to become CU Virtual. It is similar to an Intranet, a closed system that is accessible from the outside by individuals who have accounts on the system. It resides on an HP Netserver with dual 133 MHz processors running a Windows NT operating system. This service began in the summer of 1996, with the first students and faculty coming on line in the Fall semester of 1996. CU Virtual is a FirstClass client server system that combines e-mail, conferencing, live chat, and a simple file transfer and web publishing tool. Students are given accounts on the server, and they can connect to the server via a TCP-IP connection, a direct modem connection, or a web-browser. They can download the freely distributable client software from the web site or