Prynhawn da bawb

You have already heard from Mark that the FE College is Wales have received monies to support students who may be digitally excluded. 

Background

Students who identify as being in need of a device will have the opportunity to discuss their personal needs with their tutor at the start of term and during their induction programme. The type of device needed will depend on the apps students will need to use for their programme of study.

For students accessing the internet, Moodle and Office 365 a Chromebook or a standard laptop would be suitable.  For students needing to run specialist apps a Windows 10 laptop would be the best option. In most cases, students will already have a suitable device they can use.  A suitable device can be purchased from numerous places including Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk /) and Curry’s (https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/index.html ).  Tutors should speak to their students and provide advice on the type of device that is best for their course. 

The College have limited resources and therefore will allocate loan devices to students who are most in need and fall into one of the Colleges priority groups that include  LAC, Care Leavers, Carers , Young Carers, or have an Additional Learning Need and are eligible for EMA/ WGLG and have applied for College Financial Contingency Funding.  Students will not be eligible if they have an alternative way to complete their course work or if they already have a device.

As always the additional monies that have been received are fantastic and will make a massive difference to many students. The funds are however limited and we will need to work together to ensure the students most in need are the ones that are supported.

So to support digital inclusion the College has made the following arrangements.

Online Shop to purchase Digital Equipment by instalments

The College has set up an online shop with Academia to enable students to purchase a device via monthly payments.  This gives students receiving EMA or students who are not in a position to purchase outright the ability to purchase their own device. The shop went live on Wednesday 2 September 2020. The following URL will get students directly to the shop -  https://nptc.store.academia.co.uk/

Process for a Tutor to request a Digital Loan for a Student

The eligibility form – Tutor Request for Student It Equipment Loan is available on SharePoint in the induction area.  It is also attached to this email. To get a digital loan the following steps will be followed:

1. Tutors should discuss the needs of individual students during induction - for those students that are eligible the forms should be fully completed and with as much information as possible.
2. Tutors will need to save individual forms with the students initials and their student ID in the file name  - this will mean it is easier to process – tutors should specify the device that is most suitable to the study programme
3. The individually named files should be sent to digitalloan@nptcgroup.ac.uk
4. The Digital loans team will check the eligibility of each student by checking - the College priority student lists, the College FCF applications and the Student Finance Wales system
5. Once the eligibility of the request has been authorised, the request will be sent to the IT support Teams who will allocate a device
6. The allocated device will be sent to the LRC team on each College sites who will put the device onto the Heritage Library loan system and make contact with the student to arrange an appointment time for collection of the device
7. The students will be expected to complete a loans agreement form and to return the device at the end of their pregame of study

PLEASE NOTE – The devices will remain the property of the College and will be managed by the College

Thank you all for your support at time and working together to ensure that students are Digitally Included at this strange time.

Diolch

Sian