Shift Your Training Model
I just attended a one day training session and experienced the following:
- The trainer taught straight from PowerPoint bullets and read the text (well he had most of it memorized) from the handouts.
- The trainer didn’t like it when someone raised their hand or interrupted him to ask a question.
- Wrote questions on the whiteboard and never addressed them.
- Was rushed to cover the content in the allotted time for the session.
Does this all sound all too familiar? Have you ever stopped to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself if I am this guy when I do my training? I mean really think about it. Ask yourself who the training is for. Is it for me, the trainer- after all this is my job we are talking about- or is it about the students and what they are learning? Take another look at what you do for training. Do your activities focus on you or your students?
Have we been focusing on ourselves for so long that we have lost the fact that we are here for the students not for us? We are here to provide the students with knowledge and to enable them to reason, not to spew out facts and page after page of information. We need to redirect or energies and to change our focus from at training-centric training model to a learner-centric training model.
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I just sat thru four one hour sessions on some technical software that required setting up VM Ware servers, SQL database, Installing SharePoint and then customizing sharepoint. That was alot of information to provide in 4 hours. Especially, if you are not familiar with any of these programs. After Session 3 we were asked to provide feedback to improve the class. Wow, what an open door that was.
I actually took an hour to sift through the PowerPoint slides and read the some of the bullets. It probably wouldn’t suprise you to learn that there were at least 5 bullet points with full sentances and sometimes a paragragh per slide. Gray slide with black text after gray slide with black text (not very stimulating and nothing to denote which section we were talking about or what is really important). In total (I really didn’t add them up) there was somewhere around 400-500 slides. Now multiple this by the bullet points. Now remember I said this was a training course broken down into (4) one hour sessions. Do you think there might be something wrong with this? I do. I wouldn’t call this a “training” course at all. I would call this a glorified documentation.
I went back to the first sessions slides and found the course “goals”. I reread them and then did what I always do- I asked myself did I get that from these sessions? The answer was that some of the coarse goals were met but the majority were not. Then I went to the section on who should attend. Then I asked myself was this material presented in a way that those on the attendee list would understand what was being “trained”. Again I feel they missed the mark.
So, with all this being said here is something I use to make sure that I am sticking to my guns and delivering what I said I was going to deliver. It’s a Module Development Guideline Checklist. Now, this is something for each module not for the entire course. The course has its own checklist. See the table below.
I also have a MS Word document format too. If you want a copy, then just drop me a quick line and I’ll email it to you.
Module Development Guideline Checklist
Complete the following checklist to ensure your module mathces competencies, objectives, exercises and evaluations in and integrated instructional design.
| Module Review | Yes | No | N/A |
| Objectives | |||
| The objectives are listed/defined on the first page of the module (after the title page). | |||
| There are 3 to 6 objectives in the module. | |||
| Each objective is tied to the evaluation through an exercise or a question. | |||
| The objectives can be measured as met or not met in the module (SMART). | |||
| Competencies | |||
| The competencies identify what participants need to know to complete their job. | |||
| The key competencies are tied to an objective. | |||
| Exercises | |||
| There is at least one exercise tied to each performance objective (requires a participant to perform a task). | |||
| Evaluation | |||
| Each objective is tied to a question or exercise. | |||
| An evaluation for each performance objective can be used in conjunction with the associated exercise. | |||
| The correct information to answer each question can be identified by page number. | |||
| I can match each objective to a question or exercise. |
Filed under: General, PDM, PLM, Training | Leave a Comment
Tags: General, PDM, PLM, Training
In the CAD world we have all experienced the traditional teaching method of Hear, See, Do. In these classes we listen to an instructor talk about a specific function in the software as the instructor demonstrates the function on the overhead projector. Once the instructor has covered the functional areas of the function we are then asked to complete an exercise in the workbook. In the instructors eyes if we complete this exercise we have learned the function. This is Hear, See, Do at its best. Why is it that we, as learners and trainers, have accepted this as the de facto training method?
Is it because we have heard and believe the statistics that:
People learn x% of what they hear, y% of what they see… where the highest results is usually what we categorized as “learned activity”?
We have assumed that “doing” is a direct function of learning but in reality doing is an indirect function- one of many indirect functions. What we fail to understand is that learning requires two things to move the information from short-term memory to the long-term memory parts of your brain; you have to pay attention and you have to think. Folks, we are talking about retention here- the real “learning”.
First off Hear, See, Do is assuming that by having the student duplicate what they were shown that they have learned the function. This is the monkey see, monkey do mentality. Learning is more than repeating a task; it is understanding the information (paying attention) and applying the knowledge (thinking).
Secondly, it assumes that we cannot learn by seeing, hearing, and “thinking”. Now here’s the kicker, how can the instructor observe me thinking? Is he looking for smoke coming out of my ears or maybe the famous “Thinker” poise? My point is you can’t observe “thinking” so we want to rely on “doing” as our metric for learning. If you can do it you have learned it.
Typical Learning Example:
You are watching the demo on the overhead projector, listening to the instructor and trying to take some notes at the same time. (See a problem already?) I take my eyes off the screen and write down some notes. The instructor moves to the next function as I am writing, talks about the new function and then does a quick demo and tells us to do the next exercise in the workbook. I completed the exercise based on the directions in the workbook.
What’s wrong here? Was I able to pay attention to the instructor and did I have time to think about what was being covered? Probably not. Stop for a second and reflect on what I said needs to happened in order for learning to occur. You need to pay attention and to think (to process what you have been told and reflect on how this new information affects your previous experiences).
OK, so how do we solve the problems that occur with Hear, See, Do? Easy, move from a Trainer-centric to a Learner-centric teaching process. Focus your activities so that you have the group thinking about something or collaborating on an idea. This is a huge shift in the way we currently teach and would require us to rewrite our training materials or at the least re-think about how we deliver our training.
More to come on Learner-Centric or Learner Centered teaching.
Filed under: General, Training | 1 Comment
Tags: Autocad, General, NX5, NX6, NX7, PDM, PLM, Solid Edge, SolidWorks, SW, Training
To Train or not to Train
People, usually managers, tend to think that if a group of people who don’t understand something or are not performing to a certain level that the group of people need training. I’ve found that the “training issues” that the manager tells me about aren’t training issues at all- they are cases of bad communication. (If you read my previous blog then you know something about ADDIE. Research what the A means!)
Bad communication can be as simple as someone sending you an email that says you have new standards to follow and nothing else. Or maybe you get a link to a document that covers a new procedure and that link takes you to the wrong file or is buried so far in your corporate servers that it’s totally lost. Bad communication can be someone telling you the “right way” to do something to later find out that the person has been doing it wrong for a long time as well.
The last example is what we call “tribal knowledge“. Tribal knowledge is the knowledge that a group of people have but it’s unwritten and unknown outside the group. Have you ever heard this, “That’s just the way it works around here.” or ”Yeah, the standards say to do it a different way but we don’t follow them. It works better for us if we do it this way.”
Tribal knowledge can be a good thing but most of the time it can be very damaging for a group. Having all this unwritten and unknown knowledge residing with just a few within an organization limits the ability of the rest of the organization to capitalize on the knowledge. When we are talking about misinformation that is passed on within a group to a newcomer it becomes bad information and bad communication.
By providing better forms of communication we can reduce the amount of perceived training for our organizations. Quick Reference Card, a web page with discreet directions, or webpage navigation that actually contains logically named sub-sections are simple solutions for better communication. By reorganizing information so that it is logical to everyone- not just to your webmaster or CAD Jockey- can correct a lot of “training issues”. Giving someone a simple reference card that they can pull out when they need to do a specific task saves everyone time and money. These are known as learning aids.
So, do you train your group or do you reorganize information or present it in a new and usable way instead? That’s the tough question you need to ask yourself. But remember, you are a limited resource and so is your organizations cash! My recommendation is to really understand the need for the training first and foremost. Do an analysis to determine if you really have a training need.
Here’s an example I did of reorganizing the terms of spline in an online format. Previous to this the spline terms were defined and used in many different surfacing and spline creations documents that were scattered about a large software documentation system. By condensing the information to one location and providing an easy to use interface makes understanding the spline terms easier; the learner can relate to different components of the spline to whole spline. By providing a quick way for user to locate the learning aid when they need to refresh themselves is a good example of using learning aids.
Filed under: CAD, General, nx, NX6, NX7, PDM, PLM, Support, Training | Leave a Comment
I’m wondering how many of us in the CAD training world have had the same “career path”? What I mean by that is how many of us were the Go-to person, the SME or the CAD jockey for the company and were then tossed into a training positioning. I have a feeling it might be a majority of us.
Now, how many times have you been to a training sessions- any training session- that after you were done taking the class you wondered if the class was worth the time and money or you asked yourself what did I really learn from this class. If you have asked yourself any of those questions then there was something definitely wrong with the class. More than likely someone sat down and started to write some documentation on a topic and attempted to turn it into a class. If this sounds familiar, it should, because we are all guilty of this.
See there is one big problem with this overall scenario of turning a SME (subject matter experts) into a trainer- we usually don’t have any background on how people learn or even how to deliver a training session. In some cases we may not even like to speak in front of groups but yet here we are.
Is knowing how people learn or how to create effective training materials important? You bet it’s important! If you don’t know the basics of adult learning, graphics for learning or instructional design how do you expect to be effective in your new role? There is actually a whole profession, actually several professions, that do what you have been tasked to do. You might know these professionals as trainers, facilitator, learning consultants, corporate coaches or a slew of other names. But when it comes to building structured and effective training materials you need to look for an instructional designer or a training specialist. An instructional designer is a person that Analyzes, Develops, Deliver, Implements and Evaluates training and training materials while the training specialist will have the combination of instructional design background and training facilitation skills. These people live and breathe ADDIE.
Now, if you don’t know about ADDIE, then I would highly suggest you Google it. You might be surprised at the amount of hits you will get. As of today, I received 2,910,000 hits! For a quick definition ADDIE is a systematic approach for to the instructional design process. It provides a framework to make sure that your instructional design products (your training materials) are effective. You have a hint in the post on what ADDIE stands for..look for it.
Looking at this process and comparing it to what we did to build our class I bet you and I both started at the development stage. We started writing down what we knew and then we delivered our class. We did the DD in ADDIE and what kind of results did we get? Probably what we deserved a “D”. See, we started in the middle of the process without fully understanding what needs to be done. It’s not our fault. Remember we were thrown into this new role. To be effective I highly, and I mean highly, recommend that you spend some time reading up on ADDIE.
Filed under: CAD, General, Support, Training, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Tags: Autocad, Catia, NX5, NX6, NX7, PDM, PLM, Solid Edge, SolidWorks, SW, Teamcenter, Training
Your Thoughts About..
In this blog I hope that we can explore several different facets of the CAD, PLM and PDM world. I hope to see comments on training, support, technical issues, what you like and dislike about your current engineering tools.
Filed under: General | 4 Comments
Tags: General
