Like a lot of people I used to believe that a "good" IT training session was well structured, where the trainer would know in advance the precise order of events. Learners would come in, obediently absorb what they were "taught", and only ask questions relevant to the current topic. Any question which didn't fit the immediate subject was answered with a "yes we'll come on to that later", otherwise known as the "my sequence is more important than your need to learn" answer.

Recently, the IT training sessions have followed a different form. Let's use a spreadsheet (Excel) training session as an example, a recent one went something like this:

• the learners identify what it is they wish to learn and to what use they will put the spreadsheet
• then they spend five minutes "playing" with Excel, simply getting some experience of what it looks like
• each learner then describes an example use of Excel which is relevant to them, which might be a departmental budget or a time sheet or an analysis of audit data or whatever
• the group then looks at the Mind-Map for the session and the learners decide which topic to start with
• the session proceeds with the learners deciding which topics to cover and in what order, and at each stage each individual works on an example which is specifically relevant to them.

What's the point of adopting this approach?

People learn more and enjoy learning more !

There are no neat training plans, less structure, less chaos and far more learning - which is the whole point of the session. Individual learners are intelligent people, they know what they need to learn and in what order they need to learn it. They don't want to slavishly cover a list of irrelevant topics but they do want to spend longer on those parts which are of most use to them. Also, people don't want to work on Mickey Mouse examples, they want to work on examples and exercises which will be of maximum benefit to them, which means of maximum relevance.

As I said at the beginning less structure more chaos, less training and more learning.

If you think this session is different you ought to try the "Introduction to the Computer" course !

Have fun

©1998 Simon Stanton