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Going Beyond Paper Based Training Material?
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?"
I work in a department that creates Financial IT-related training for our customers.
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 refer back to this book.
Similar to your mention, we do not hand out electronic copies. Indeed it can be all too easily reused for training others, which is not only a financial loss but more importantly for us a risk of reputation as well as the people giving such copied training are not certified to do so. We actually had a few cases in the past when the powerpoint files had leaked out and independent consults gave payable training with it that was of bad quality. We knew because those customers complained to us.
In a few cases we mention a download link to the participants during a course where they can retrieve a pdf of a section of the book, these are typically checklists and so on.