Blog Post: Using non-technical activities for technical training.

Dr. Ann Kwinn was winding down her presentation on The Virtual Classroom when she decided to outline a bit of an upcoming workshop that she and technical training guru Ruth Clark would be facilitating.  As Ann revealed that participants would be designing virtual classroom training during the workshop, I asked: "Will we need to bring laptops to the workshop?"

I thought this was a good question, because laptops had never been mentioned whenever we discussed her workshop, and yet it seemed they would be an integral part of the course if we were to be designing virtual training.

Ann surprised many of us by answering: "No, you'll be designing your projects on paper."  Big pieces of paper, apparently.

This lead me to wonder, in my best Carrie Bradshaw impersonation: "Can a technical or systems-based workshop succeed using paper-based activities?"

It's possible go low-tech intermittently, I suppose.  After all, Dr. Kwinn demonstrated the Virtual Classroom concept of polling quite well with flash cards.  She handed each participant a stack of flash cards, each a different colour, displayed a question with colour-coded answers on a Powerpoint slide, and asked us to answer the question by holding up a flash card that matched the colour of the answer. 

Voila!  Instant polling!

Ann's decision to back away from the computer in this training class isn't a novel concept.  Discover Dan Roam, who wrote a book on visual thinking called: The Back of the Napkin.  In this book, Dan comments that computer programs such as Excel or Powerpoint can be obstacles to buy-in during meetings, that our messages can be better communicated using simple drawings.  Powerpoint's a media everybody loves to hate, but Dan suggests that drawing our ideas on the back of a napkin (or any surface, really) can help crystallize these ideas in other peoples' heads.  He's made quite a career of this, appearing on CNN, Fox News, and other shows to demonstrate his visual thinking methodology like a street magician.

Let's give a for-instance on how low-tech activities can differently engage our brain. 

Ann's message at the beginning of her presentation was that the training mode is not impactful for the transference of knowledge, the training methodology is.  In other words, you can design the same training for instructor-led, eLearning, or WebEx classes, and the amount of knowledge transferred will remain the same for each person regardless of which version of the course that person took.  If you stand in front of a classroom, in front of a camera, or in front of a computer monitor and lecture, the learners will still remember a small share of the information you've provided because, as we all know, telling ain't training.

Now.  Let's imagine that Ann did cart in several computer stations so each attendee could play around with a virtual classroom software program.  Let's imagine that she decided to demonstrate polling by asking a question in the virtual classroom, and asking everyone to respond virtually.  We would all get the idea of what polling is, just like we did using Ann's flash cards.  In both cases, Ann designed an activity that had us experience an example of polling.

But would we have been able to acknowledge that the methodology we're used to using in the classroom is what we need to pay attention to when we design our virtual training?  By having us raise coloured flash cards, Ann created an "ah-hah moment," revealing not only that polling is a tool to be used in virtual training, but that it's something already within our design toolboxes.  So is whiteboarding, so is transferring the class audio to a virtual attendee.

I doubt that would have been as obvious if Ann had gone the technical route, even if she had stopped to say: "Remember, this is something you already do in classroom training."  I believe we would have nodded, and pushed another button when told that doing so is the next step.

I wonder how often we complicate our technical training by relying upon the system that we're training as the training mode.  I wonder if, sometimes, the concepts that we need to discuss are set on the back burner because now we're pushing buttons and experiencing a new tool -- learning how to use a new tool, not necessarily how best to apply it.