Training seminars: the handshake connection

HydroComp Web Log

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Training seminars: the handshake connection
Miscellaneous Musings from the Technical Director

Wednesday, 18-JUN-2007 by Donald MacPherson - Technical Director

I had a really great time last week with eight propulsion professionals at a special one-day PropExpert seminar that we held right here in Durham. The discussion was active and the topics extended beyond just the use of PropExpert. (This is typical for our seminars, where some of the tangent discussions can be very lively and constructive.) Also last week, I received an email about participating in an industry online training program. It got me to thinking, which can be a dangerous thing...

I'm in an interesting position as software developer, active technology user, part-time-academic, and online content provider (such as for the blog article that you are reading). And, I must admit that I'm getting less and less enamored with the vast smorgasbord of proposed online approaches to learning. There are literally thousands of (generally academic) presentations about the "potential" for online training technology. While we can find a few successful applications of online training - typically which are very focused (meaning limited in scope) - we see virtually no broad commercial use of instructor-based online training. Why is that? If you are reading this article, you presumably are at least somewhat conversant on the web. How many times have you ever participated in some type - any type - of effective online training?

Is it that most of the current online approaches try to take a conventional teaching process and fit it into an online setting? You know what I mean - where a teacher is transmitting an image of a "blackboard" across the web and speaking to students via a computer connection. Could it simply be that effective learning needs the live connection with the instructor and other students? Is there some sort of physical social bond that is necessary for effective training? I would submit that there is.

Consider our PropExpert gathering last week. We held a one day, pretty intensive, propeller software training seminar. People traveled in from California, Kentucky, Florida, Nova Scotia to sit down with me for one day. Time has become the most valuable commodity we have, which makes their decision to travel somewhat counter-intuitive. The reality, however, is that I could never have provided the value of the give-and-take experience to my participants via an online setting. The ability to sketch flow diagrams and demonstrate concepts with model propellers would have been impossible in the 2D setting of a computer screen. The immediate interaction of comments to questions amongst the participants would have been stifled through the one-feed-in and one-feed-out of a microphone and speaker. The amount of time that I would have needed to spend creating online-specific content would have made it profoundly more expensive. Quite simply, we were successful because all of the participants had eyeball-to-eyeball contact. We had a "handshake connection".

Let me also take a moment to distinguish between instructor-based online "training" from passive online "self-teaching". Online self-teaching is clearly a valuable resource, but we should admit that it is really little more than a convenient alternative to books. The internet certainly has made it possible for anyone to publish content about almost any subject, and there are many really great sources of useful information that can be used in self-teaching. (HydroComp's own Knowledge Library is intended to be such a resource.) But there are two potential problems to consider. First, I bemoan the loss of hard copy books, as they are great for "discovery". When was the last time that you tried to look up something in a book, and in the search for the answer also discovered something else of interest? I love that about books - you never know what tidbit of useful information you'll run across. The other potential issue to consider is that while the internet offers publishing access to anyone, there is the corresponding question of credibility. For almost no startup cost, I could start a web site and begin publishing content about almost anything. To overstate my premise, I would not like my doctors working on me with information that I wrote. All I am saying is "consider the source"...

Is there a place for online training? I suspect so, and perhaps it is a matter of scale. What is not reasonable for eight participants might be practical for 80, or more likely, for 80 thousand. Perhaps it also means that how we conduct online training will need to be dramatically different from the classroom-style process that we all know so well. But I also know one more thing - natural selection works. I believe that natural selection will eventually rule all successful changes in industry and technology. I believe that you can "guide", but you cannot "force", an evolutionary technology. How long have we been talking about the great potential benefits of online training? How much more are we going to talk about it, and invest time and money into it? Perhaps I'm just a bit old fashioned, but for something like training - even training in high technology products - sometimes low tech is best.