by Tony Short
I love the term “stand-up training” as it betrays the fact that the focus tends to be on the trainer, rather than on the learners (the “sit-downs”, I guess?). Once the students are trapped in front of the trainer or lecturer, they have little choice but to follow the whims and vagaries of the speaker.
With a good e-learning programme, the learner can be given multiple entry-points by which to access the course material, so they can skip the content that’s not quite suited to their needs. How I wish that were the case when I have to attend day-long training seminars or best-practice workshops!
The attendees of seminars are subjected to every word the speaker utters, with only a short SCB break around lunchtime (SCB? Sandwiches, Cigarettes and Bodily functions).
Here’s a case in point, from the perspective of one of the poor schmuck’s stuck in the audience….
I tend to avoid free seminars, but this one was only a couple of miles down the road from me, and the topics to be covered looked interesting. About sixty of us were supposed to start the day with breakfast rolls at the venue near Maidenhead. The company sponsoring the event had thoughtfully laid on breakfast for about seventy people. It wasn’t their fault that the weather was awful and there had been and multi-vehicle pile-up which blocked the motorway nearby. An hour and a half after the allotted start time, only about a third of the attendees had made it through the door. Phone calls made from hard-shoulders let us know that we could expect some stragglers in about half an hour, “so could we perhaps hang on a bit before starting?”
The intrepid few who had made it on time were encouraged to have a second, and then a third, breakfast roll.
The organisers of the event decided to change around the order of the programme, and to start with some hands-on stuff. I overheard some of the attendees muttering that they had only come for the first three lectures and had hoped to slip away before the hands-on bit started. As some of them had arranged other meetings in the afternoon, this meant they actually had to miss the lectures completely, and spend time looking at things they had no interest in. They weren’t happy – and the offer of further (now very cold) breakfast rolls didn’t seem to console them.
Of course, one or two people actually turned up after lunch, because the thing they were interested in was the chance to do some hands-on stuff. These poor souls shuffled into the back of the lecture theatre, where they were later told that the hands-on bit had already finished. They found themselves effectively pinned to their seats as the arrangement of the seminar room meant the only exit point was a door right next to the lecturer – and no-one was quite brazen enough to brush past the speaker (whilst he was in mid flow) to beat a retreat. I did see a few people eyeing the emergency fire exit at the back, plainly wondering if it led to a convenient fire escape, and trying to work out if the door lock was fitted with an alarm.
The stand-up bit of the seminar covered four main topics. Whilst chatting to fellow attendees over my fifth cup of coffee in the prolonged pre-seminar breakfast, I had established that most people were interested in only two or three of the topics, and were resigned to sitting through the other lectures (taking the opportunity for some furtive Blackberry action).
But when the talks did get underway after a late start, there was little time left to cover the ground. To make the most of his limited time, the first speaker started his talk by asking the audience a few questions to try to gauge what level to pitch things at. It immediately became apparent that some attendees barely understood what the title of the presentation meant, whilst others were (near as damn it) experts in the field. I could see the poor speaker scanning the faces in the audience, and thinking to himself “so, which elements of the audience shall I alienate?” When he got underway, the bloke to my left was taking notes so frantically that the graphite in his pencil glowed red hot. At the same time, the bloke to my right skilfully managed to impart, by a few carefully calculated long, loud sighs, that “this tedious coverage of such basic, elementary, kindergarten stuff is an insult to my great intelligence, and a gross misuse of my (very precious) time”.
As I sat through one of the sessions irrelevant to my needs, I found my mind wandering (I don’t have a Blackberry to play with). The day had really impressed upon me the strengths of online learning, and the great advantage of being able to navigate through content quickly in a non-linear way. I worked out that my day out of the office had resulted in no more than 60 – 90 minutes of worthwhile learning (if that). And I thanked my lucky stars that at least I had only traveled about six miles that day – others had driven a couple of hundred miles, in total. Half of the audience never did arrive, but at least those who did make it could be furnished with a few breakfast rolls to eat on the long journey home.
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