Have you ever played Paper, Scissors, Rock? You know the game where scissors beats paper, and rock beats scissors, but paper covers rock.
In my last post, I looked at survey data from our Meeting Maker to Oracle Calendar Migration and drew some conclusions about how people learn. Today I'd like to talk about the methods people use to get their information. Well, it's time to play a little paper, scissors, rock...
One-on-One Training
What can I say about one-on-one training? We all love to have the opportunity to have a person on hand all to ourselves for our individualized training needs.
It's a great way to keep training individualized and interactive, but one-on-one does not scale as well as...
Face-to-Face Group Sessions
Face-to-face group sessions beat one-on-one sessions in their scalability.
Why
train one person at a time when you can get six or ten or twenty in a
room for training. Training may be less individualized, but setting
prerequisites may be one way to keep like groups together.
Unfortunately, trying assemble a group of people with varying schedules and different locations is problematic for face-to-face sessions, unlike...
Webcast Sessions (Adobe Connect/Media Site)
Webcast sessions beat face-to-face sessions in their ability to conquer space and time.
People
have the flexibility to watch live from their office or view the
recorded session later. The ability to replay the session afterwards
allows them to recall details they may have missed the first time
around, or pause to practice the skills they learn.
Webcasts are great for involving people who would not be able to find the time to attend the regularly scheduled session, but something even better for quick, on-demand, individualized training needs would be...
Single-Topic Multimedia Demos
Single-topic multimedia demos, made in-house and/or available from
third-party sources like Lynda.com, are extremely helpful for those
teachable moments when a user needs to know something now.
The single-topic demos are usually no more than five or ten minutes and directly-related to the task at hand, so the users don't feel that they are making time for training or that they will never use what they learn; they are using it right now—the training is immediately relevant! They can pause and work alongside the demo and replay if necessary.
The only thing missing is the person beside them to help work through their individualized questions, which is why... one-on-one beats single topic.
Why did I take you through this little game? Sylvia MacKinnon and I put together a poster session for the User Services Conference this week, and one of the points we wanted to drive home is that no one method was the panacea.
All of these methods must work together because they all have benefits. You can take the material you developed for one and adapt it for use in the next. The Oracle Calendar migration survey data showed that those who made use of a variety of methods were more comfortable with Oracle calendar, so increasing the variety of training methods increases the possibility that learning will occur.
It's like playing paper scissors rock with three hands in the game: one paper, one scissors, one rock—no matter what, you'll be a winner!
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