STUDENT ROLES

Extend student roles as assistants, learning colleagues; form Faculty Student Support Service Teams (FSSSTS) and learning communities. Student Assistants. Undergraduate students have performed well as assistants in a wide variety of jobs on campus for years. What is new is the recognition that many undergraduates have better skills and knowledge about information technology than most faculty and staff members. Student assistants can help other students, staff members, and faculty members (and even K- 12 teachers and students), and most faculty seem to have little problem accepting help from them. Student assistants can help increase the educational use of information technology, alleviate the support-service crisis, and save money for the institution. Most campuses have some librarians or computing staff who are already using student assistants or intems quite sucessfully. These professionals can be quite helpful in designing extended program to engage more students in combating the support-service crisis. Phil Long, director of instruction and research technology at William Paterson College, reports great success with student assistants owing to an extensive training program he has developed for them and to the substantial staff time that has been committed to scheduling and supervising their work. Most of those who have successfully used students ort the importance of recruitment, training, supervision, and wards. Students who go to work on the front lines helping their peers or faculty members usually need training and guid ance not only on the technicalities, but also on pedagogy and service manners. Work-study wages are usually quite low. Another alternative, labeling the work an internship, may remove the necessity for paying the students, giving them academic credit instead. If this begins to sound too much like exploitation, it isn't. Most students enjoy this work. In addition, as they acquire technical and people/service skills, they prepare both for higher-paying part-time jobs in the information industries during college, and for entry-level positions in a wide variety of businesses after college. The potential career benefits for these students are real and obvious to them.

Faculty Student Support Service Teams. The AAHE TLTR Program encourages participating colleges and universities to extend the idea of using students as assistants by forming Fac- ulty Student Support Service Teams (FSSSTs). Each FSSST consists of individuals representing key support services- such as library, computing, and faculty development-and includes student assistants. (If it is not feasible to assign people full-time to these teams, an institution can begin by form- ing one FSSST as a pilot test and assigning something like 20 percent of a person's time from each category.) FSSSTs can provide some faculty members who are trying to improve thei teaching and their students' leaming through more effective uses of information technology with the full range of support services necessary to make the transition successful. A by-product of forming an FSSST-or a separate valu- able activity in itself-is "cross-training" among key support services: librarians train computing specialists and student assistants; faculty development specialists train librarians and student assistants; technology specialists train faculty development professionals and student assistants; and so on.  George Mason University is already having some success with this approach. Learning Colleagues, Learning Communities. Fonning FSSSTs and having students serve as technical assistants can help faculty recognize students' expertise in academic uses of information technology, thus precipitating a movement to- ward the eventual fon-nation of more collaborative learning communities-communities in which faculty are relied on for leadership, but students participate actively in shaping the goals of instruction and selecting the means for achieving them. The changing structure of infon-nation resources@spe- cially those available on the Internet-and changing demo- graphics of students and faculty also may support shifts in this direction.

For example, in most academic disciplines, it has now be- come impossible for a faculty member to know every useful resource that a bright beginning student might stumble into on the Internet while doing a research paper. Consequently, a fac- ulty member cannot always control or evaluate student re- search in traditional ways, and many faculty are adopting pedagogical approaches in which students are encouraged to take more active roles as learners. In addition, more undergraduate and graduate students are taking courses part-time while working part-time or full-time. Meanwhile, many full-time employees in industry teach part- time late in their careers. Based on their experience working in teams for their jobs, these "non-traditional" students and faculty may accept a collegial relationship with each other more comfortably than would their "traditional" counterparts. As "learning colleagues," students accept more responsibili- ty for their own education, including understanding their own needs and abilities and the characteristics of the pedagogics and instructional materials most helpful to them. Eventually this trend may lead to the formation of formally recognized learning communities.