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?"

Comments

Make the paper worth something

[Xoc-S]

The problem with paper based training materials is that frequently they are just copies of slides. Good paper based training materials stands on its own as a book that can act as a reference when the course is over. That means that the concepts that the instructor covered are explained in the book with examples, screen shots, and comes with the sample programs that the instructor was demonstrating.

The instructor gives value by being able to answer questions and adds his real-world experience to the concepts in the book. The instructor can ask questions, and makes sure that the students understand the concepts before moving on.

Manuals?

[192939495969798999]

There is an incredible shortage of user/programming manuals from the creators of the languages, which yields a deforesting effort by 3rd party writers. I wish you could get a book for (insert new language here), from the creators of it, that looked like the old programming/user manuals. You could know nothing about programming, or the bare minimum, and come out of it with the ability to fully operate and create solutions to any given problem within the parameters of that language -- all without Google!

copying

[polar red]

Presumably, they don't want students stealing electronic copies of their work

yeah, it is impossible to copy a paper-version.

What determines a good training/lesson

[Down_in_the_Park]

I'm not sure if I really understand the topic, may be it's related solely to software development training where I can't say very much to, as I'm working in life science. But isn't the quality of most training and teaching heavily dependent on the trainer/teacher and the better he/she is the better the lesson/training is.

If you really believe that the people you train will take over your job, than what is it, that makes you a good trainer? Just the material you provided? Shoudn't you have methods to transmit your knowledge that goes beyond a powerpoint presentation and a flip chart? When I remember my university career, the lectures or practica that where given with enthusiasm and that tried to create an interest in the subject were the ones that sticked in your mind, so to say.

When I give a lecture and the people ask me for my presentation, what should I be afraid of? Did they worked in this field as long as I did? Do they want to become a trainer or teacher? Well, it takes an effort to be a good trainer and who cares about the bad ones?

Paper

[Hijacked Public]

The problem with getting away from paper is that it soundly thrashes anything you can produce on a computer when it comes to resolution and density of content. Unfortunately, most paper training supplements don't take advantage of either and end up being direct copies of the electronic material.

Being aware of what paper can do goes a long way toward reducing the amount of information you actually print. While different subjects offer different opportunities, focusing on graphic means of communicating ideas and data and combining that with the resolution of paper can often mean that you can compress dozens of electronic slides into a single piece of paper.

Read some of Edward Tufte's work, it is a good place to start.

Re:watermarking

[CastrTroy]

Tiffs would be hard or impossible to search (i guess it's possible with OCR, although , which would defeat the whole purpose of having the document in electronic format.