Going Beyond Paper Based Training Material? 37
ydrol asks: "Training Companies (and training departments) seem to take great delight in handing over a pile of folders full of paper based training materials at the end of a course. Presumably, they don't want students stealing electronic copies of their work and training others, as it is a lucrative source of revenue. The downside is that it is often impractical to refer to these training notes after the course is over. Does anyone have any ideas — both for students (short of using psexec to grab the electronic notes from the teachers laptop) and for training companies themselves on how we can improve the situation?"
Electronic! (Score:2)
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If you really want information you should always attent the course. One thing you can do is handing out the presentation you might give, but making it very global. The specific things you tell them instead of having it in the presentation. When the students look at the presentation again they'll (hopefully) remember whay you said, and other people won't.
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When the students look at the presentation again they'll (hopefully) remember whay you said,
Highly unlikely. I've never been able to use presentation slides as any sort of aide-memôire -- there's just too little information in them. It's generally the finer details that you forget, and PowerPoint presentations don't have space for the finer details.
HAL
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Yes, I am French.
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how about.. (Score:1)
real reality tests?
Make the paper worth something (Score:3, Insightful)
The instructor gives value by being able to answer questions and adds his real-world experience to the concepts in the book. The instructor can ask questions, and makes sure that the students understand the concepts before moving on.
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I do a two-hour PowerPoint/presentation best practices training. The question I like to ask to get people to move away from designing their PowerPoint as a book on the screen (which they do so that they can hand out the slides and be done with handouts) is, "If I can get the whole content of your presentation just by reading your PowerPoint slides, then why are you there?" I like to emphasize the PowerPoint as atmosphere not sole content idea, and I really encourage people not to hand out the PowerPoin
Training materials: what we do (Score:2, Informative)
We always hand out a paper book at the START of the course. There are not only the slides but already a sizeable amount of notes under the slides, as reference material. The participants typically scribble extra notes here and there in the book. That is more useful than handing it out at the end. And it's a paperback which takes less space than a big binder. From our surveys, it seems that many customers from time to time re
Manuals? (Score:4, Insightful)
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copying (Score:2, Insightful)
yeah, it is impossible to copy a paper-version.
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via 0CR, as you con see sleling prmted not es
~1344jx idea.
watermarking (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure its worth protecting slides much more than this - if your course is so chalk & talk that the slides capture everything, the bad reputation you'll gain will cost you more than piracy.
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What determines a good training/lesson (Score:2, Insightful)
If you really believe that the people you train will take over your job, than what is it, that makes you a good trainer? Just the material you provided? Shoudn't you have methods to trans
Improve Content First, Distribution Second (Score:3, Interesting)
If I had to choose, I would prefer a higher quality doc than a digital one.
Generally Ineffective (Score:3, Funny)
Manuals don't make a good course (Score:1)
The problem is that I have yet to convince the administrators that this is the case. Fortunately, they see printing as being a cost they would rather avoid, so moving to electro
Paper (Score:3, Insightful)
Being aware of what paper can do goes a long way toward reducing the amount of information you actually print. While different subjects offer different opportunities, focusing on graphic means of communicating ideas and data and combining that with the resolution of paper can often mean that you can compress dozens of electronic slides into a single piece of paper.
Read some of Edward Tufte's [edwardtufte.com] work, it is a good place to start.
I must be getting old ... (Score:2)
I've been to a lot of technical training, and by far, the training books are what -really- tell you how something works. I much prefer to open the book, look up something in the index, while I have the product/etc. up on my screen. It's a lot easier to work that way for me.
I must be getting old
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I don't think you're getting old, I think the real problem many developers haven't clued into yet is making electronic books act like real ones on the computer. I thought of going to rentacoder.com and have someone come up with a program to turn a PDF into a algorithmmically generated 3D model ebook that would behave as such, I think the real problem is
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a) I haven't found an eBook format I like yet. PDF's are ok, sorta kinda. Not nearly as easy to use a real book with indices though.
b) Screen real estate is precious. I've got a 23" LCD at home, and a 24" LCD at work, and frankly, I wouldn't want to have a training manual or two open on the screen while I'm trying to get some work done. I have much more "physical desktop" space than I do screen real estate, and that's important too. I can have two or t
Good boy--gooood boyyyy! (Score:2)
computer-based training (Score:2)
I chose a different job for other reasons, not because of their products.
Paper? Lucrative? (Score:3, Interesting)
You are not buying a book. The fees paid to trainers are for their knowledge and skills at presentation. Handouts or binders are at best a bonus. Please don't confuse training with shopping at Amazon.com.
I admit to wondering how referring to printed handouts after the fact can be seen as "impractical." Do you have rare paper allergy? Are you illiterate or an individual with a visual impairment that makes reading text difficult?
Maybe try thinking of paper as the Linux of communication tools - universal, almost free (as in beer) and accessible to anyone, anywhere without the use of proprietary tools.
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Careful now, be sure to release this derivative description under the GPL lest ye be hunted down by RMS ninjas. Consider yerself warned! Arrr!
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I admit to wondering how referring to printed handouts after the fact can be seen as "impractical."
Five years into my computing career, I've already been given more course notes than I can realistically store at my desk. They'd all fit on single CD if they were in electronic form.
HAL
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The reason why they hand out mostly paper based copies is that
Programmed instruction: IBM did it... (Score:2)