Information Technologies has contracted with Elementk.com to provide more than 500 online tutorials covering a wide range of software. The courses are free to Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students, and individuals may take as many as they like at any time. Element K tutorials offer faculty a new tool to help students acquire skills needed for success in the classroom and their profession without devoting valuable class time to technology training. Specific tutorials can be assigned as homework in order to assure students have the skills to create web pages, databases, presentations, etc., that might be used to enrich the classroom experience. Students can acquire the necessary skills at their own pace, beginning at their own level, at any time of day. The tutorials lend themselves to just-in-time refresher courses, as well, to help both faculty and students refresh their memories on specific aspects of software operation. Tutorials are also very popular with staff who prefer to learn the software skills they need at a time and pace that's convenient for them. There's no need to wait for a class, no need to wait for an instructor to get to relevant information. It's easy to skip over information you already know and review aspects that you didn't quite get the first time. If you want to get away from the office to concentrate on a tutorial, the New Media Center in Torgersen Hall welcomes Element K users.

Tutorials cover topics for Macintosh, Windows and Unix in the following areas:

E-Paper
Acrobat

Graphics
Corel Painter
CorelDRAW
FreeHand
Illustrator
Microsoft PhotoDraw
Photoshop

Operating Systems
Mac OS
Windows
Linux
Sun Solaris
W2K system management Presentation Software
Freelance
PowerPoint

Project Management Microsoft Project

Spreadsheets
Excel
Lotus 1-2-3

Video Production
After Effects
Premiere

Word Processing
MS Word
WordPerfect