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!