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Education

Training Hundreds of Users in Many Different Sites? 19

Posted by Cliff from the leveraging-the-internet dept.
A Very Anonymous Coward asks: "I work as a technical writer for a web-based, highly secure, collaborative software program. My company has been growing at a huge rate and we now are faced with the task of training 300+ new users at 80 different sites across the country. We can travel to the sites but this is costly and our human resources are fixed so we want to avoid this. My question is what is the best way to do this type of large-scale training, especially when it is not possible to get everyone together in one room?"

I already have a comprehensive help system (created with WebHelp from Ehelp.com) complete with a "How to" section. I am thinking of creating a "Product University", a modular set of documentation where each module teaches about a different area of our product. Ideally, this material would be multimedia rather than text based. I have used a great product by Qarbon.com and it will probably play a good part of this multimedia help. This material would be the same as what we currently provide in live trainings but would be made available online 24/7. We have in the past and want to continue using WebEx for some training. We have found that the ideal size of a WebEx training is 4-5 people. Are there any alternatives to training large numbers in a group?"
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Training Hundreds of Users in Many Different Sites? More

Training Hundreds of Users in Many Different Sites?

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  • Online lectures (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mnordstr ( 472213 ) on Friday May 03, 2002 @03:30PM (#3459101) Journal
    How about online lectures? You could have a video feed sent to everyone, and perhaps let the students send questions in real time, which would be answered to everyone over the video feed. The video could also be stored for later retreival, meaning you only have to have the lectures once, newcomers can look at the old feeds.

  • Make some training videos and ship them out overnight.

    Have people at the remote site view the tapes together in front of a big TV and then have stragglers checkout the tapes on loan.

    It still wouldn't hurt if you or some of your staff went to a couple big remote sites to see how they play in real life and how they could be improved, answer the FAQs, etc.

  • Prepare powerpoints and voice-overs,
    push them with a web conferencing tool
    like Cata or Webex, that supports whiteboards
    and application sharing in browsers.
    Answer questions in text chat, or use a
    voice bridge.

  • Lotus Sametime [lotus.com]

    IBM's MindSpan [ibm.com]

    Sametime works better for meetings, but not for self-paced learning. MindSpan is a "complete" e-learning suite.

    Should also add that you can add-in the Lotus/IBM real-time translation stuff (Lotus Translation Components [lotus.com], and you can type in English, and have it render, simultaneously, for whatever the end-user needs. Japanese, German, Portugese, French, Chinese....

    • Lon-Capa [lon-capa.org]

      I seen a few other solutions, which consisted of providing documentation/multimedia in a *linear* course style flow. They, however, were far from a training course. I assume that in a training course, you want to evaluate the students/trainees. Lon-CAPA provides for this. They way that the courses are set up lends itself nicely to Multimedia/any content in small components, which build up a section. Small sections, which build up a course, and small courses that build up a curriculum. Actually, it's abstract, so you can build up whatever you want, from whatever you want.

      It's been used at many Universities for a few years and is very mature, despite being in constant development.

      It's also GPLed software. It doesn't just rival most commercial software packages, it does much more than *any* commercial software packages. The entire philosophy of Lon-CAPA is different than that of the other packages. Lon-CAPA is based around the student/admin/instructor, whereas other packages are based around the course material. This significant difference provides for a much easier and more intuitive experience.

  • the training will be forgot, write a great manual and then burn it.
    Having a tool that allows users to answer each others questions and be a reference is much more important.
    make it electronic dos so they can be indexed and search.
  • the answer is a no-brainer
  • People are going to learn what they needed to learn. Let them contribute to the material, in someplace where everyone can follow.

    The World Wide Web was supposed to be writable; there are (at least) a couple of ways to make it so. One is to set up a Faq-o-matic [usenix.org] (see also here [usenix.org]); it lets people post questions and their answers. Another is to install a Wiki [amazon.com] (link to the definitive book on the subject, proceeds help support the original Wiki). A Wiki is hard to describe; it's kind of a mix between a Web site and a graffiti wall. There are dozens of implementations and hundreds of installations; for example, here [wikipedia.com] is one trying to build a (GFDL-licensed) online encyclopedia (and here [wikipedia.com] is a page describing how to add to or modify the content there).

    These aren't complete solutions, but they should provide good supplements.
  • <shameless plug>
    check out Presedia Express, a powerpoint-based solution for publishing and managing content on the web, including lots of "e-learning" features: www.presedia.com [presedia.com]. Comes with a full-featured authoring tool, and the capability to create and track quizzes and surveys. There are common standards for such content (see e.g. aicc.org [aicc.org]). PresediaExpress will work either on its own, or integrated into a "Learning Management System" that implements one of these standards (e.g. digitalthink [digitalthink.com]).

    You would probably want the enterprise system (sits securely behind your firewall); there's also an ASP solution. I find Presedia Express powerful, flexible and very easy to use, but then I'm slightly biased ;-)
    </shameless plug>

  • I think your choices are greatly affected by the content of the training and the intended audience.

    In the past I have worked with media designers to develop CBT using Macromedia's Flash and Director that was designed to be distributed via the web, or CDs. We also used Lotus Screen Cam for demo's of different products. This was very effective when the content was not overly technical and the audience had reasonable technical skills. It was a poor solution when the content was technical.

    My experience is that technical content requires more interactivity with an instructor. If you watch a technical class, you will see the instructor often has to rephrase things, or even reiterate a bit to help the trainee understand. In these cases we've tried CBT in combination with telephone training to limited success, and satellite (think video conferencing, the more modern approach) with better success.

    -LW
  • you might try something like TightVNC (www.tightvnc.com [tightvnc.com]) with the remote keyboards locked so you're the only one driving the presentation. We've used this at my company to train doctors on our web-based medical systems and it works pretty well for us.
  • computer based training. We had this when I worked at a company of 1000's. They usually had training and a test at the end. Very good gor learning how to use a program. We made our own stuff and there was a company that made some more for us. VB is good for that.
  • In a case like this, make a standardized training tape, templates for handouts and manuals, and designate 1 experience person per site as a trainer. No travel, and the handouts and tapes will be standardized for new employees and such. And every site will be responsible for new hire training... At least thats how it works for almost every company Ive ever worked for...
    • Whoops, forgot to add... you might be tempted do some sort of flashy web based or online collaboration to do the training, which would be fine if it were like 5 or 6 people in a controlled enviroment, but 300+ around 80 sites leaves a very large margin of error. Just go with the tried and true methods of much more experienced companys and force them to sit through the boring training locally by a designated training officer....
  • CBT is an old question in computing. In Windows and to an extent in the Mac still, Macromedia Authorware is the only real choice. Director is alright for presentations. But if you need to actually manage flow in a decent way --ie, adaptive testing-- you need Authorware and its underlying Pascal logic.
    But I'm not here to plug Authorware. Nah, fuck that. I'll let Macromedia handle that on their own dime.
    What I'm here for is to ask if anybody can help me in my quest to make something as kick ass as Authorware for Linux. Yeah, as in help me do something for the community. Viva la puepla etcetra.
    Is there any chance that anybody knows where to get source for PLATO? I think CBT is a key element that is being overlooked by open source and taking a look at the PLATO code would probably be quite helpful for someone trying to come up with something a little more tasty than what's already out there.
    For those who aren't up to speed on the history of CBT, PLATO was the forerunner to the Mac app called Course of Action which later became Macromedia Authorware. PLATO was written in the language TUTOR and I've had a hard time even finding a decent implementation of TUTOR although I've found some code snippets that look very intriguing and revealing --shocking even. If you know where to get any of this early stuff, please share. I've got time these days and I'd like to take a looksie.
    As it is, in open source you are SOL for CBT. I'd like to be a part of changing that and I think one way of going at it would be to simply backtrack and see how the leading Windows solution came to be in it's current state.
    An updated open source implementation of PLATO with a few media widgets might be a real opportunity to actually move open source to the forefront of CBT and education in general. One thing about Authorware is that they've got no motivation to go where the real action is. They prefer things nice and proprietary. MP3 support in audio only came out quite recently as they were trying to push a proprietary shockwave audio format. As for DIVX drivers, well fergit about it. Closed source has to waste resources trying to trap consumers into purchasing decisions where open source can simply cut to the point which is media delivery.
  • Lots of companies out there are looking for Internet/Remote training solutions that equal the effectiveness of classroom training. It turns out that giving learners hands-on access to the technologies they are learning is critical to effectiveness, but throws a lot of wrenches into the trainer's methodologies.

    Check out http://www.useractive.com/ for some interesting white papers on the methodology and techniques we use to solve these problems.

  • I've been required to take comptuer based training before. Most such programs start with required lession one: how to use a mouse, lesson two: how to close the program. (And you better use the X button the first time, file->quit next, don't try the control-q trick or you will fail.) Needless to say nobody enjoyed it, and nothing was learned.

    I'm sure there is a way around this, but I don't know what it would be if you must do comptuer based training.

    Remember above all that different people learn best in different ways. My prefered way to learn is point the program to some live but bogus data and play around to see what happens. (In a well designed system this should be enough). For complex tasks I will revert to a manual. I know others who like to read a book in the bathtub at home, and others who like lectures best. I'm sure I've forgotten several different styles of learning in the above list. You should try to accomindate all.

    I recomend what whatever you do that you train one "expert" at each site who knows all the advanced features and can then help the rest of the site through the hard tasks that they rarely do.

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