WebEx

What I’d like to do, but can’t …

/ Melanie Marttila

Now I know what you’re thinking.  Those are the words of a whiner, but I’m stating a fact and not trying to make excuses.  Honest.  There’s only one of me, and I don’t have a time-turner, like the one Dumbledore gave Hermione in The Prisoner of Azkaban.

Last week, I expressed my coulda-woulda-shouldas with respect to a piece of computer-based training.  What I’m talking about this week is part of the same training beast.  The virtually-delivered piece.

In my role as training coordinator, it’s not my task to deliver the training or to design it, and though I am training this week, it’s because I’ve no choice in the matter.  If I didn’t step in, the project would have stalled, possibly fatally.

Even as a trainer though, I’m a total n00b.  I’ve only been a trainer for three years, and though I enjoy it, and believe I’m good at it, I know I have a lot to learn and am far from perfect.  I’m even greener with respect to instructional design.  I only started doing that last year.

But if I can think of a better way to design and deliver training, then it must need improvement.

I have to step back a bit and explain a couple of things before I get to the meat of the post.

About a month ago, the task of organizing the training of all staff in Ontario on a new initiative was assigned to me.  The training products were given to the two consultants who agreed to deliver the training.  I had two weeks to get everything together, the training schedule, WebEx meetings, and invitations.  I didn’t have time to read, let alone critique or redesign the course material for virtual delivery.

So now we’re into week three of the WebEx sessions and I’ve just started my week of training.  Already, I’ve received reports back on how boring the session is.  It wasn’t designed with virtual delivery in mind.  On average, the sessions are running two hours, which is too long to sit in front of your computer, staring at a screen.

What I’d do for this course (if I could):

  • There is a policy bulletin for the new initiative and a Job Aid.  Though technically, this was all supposed to be a “pre-read,” I’d like to have had the time to turn it into a true pre-course assignment with some form of assessment, submitted to the trainers in advance, so they could have some indication of the group’s level of understanding of the new initiative prior to the course.
  • Start with an activity reviewing the four aspects of their job that this new initiative will change and conduct a proper debrief.
  • Have the exercises on a PowerPoint or Notebook presentation with answers on a reveal.  Use the annotate feature in WebEx to have participants complete the blank assignments (one “scribe” with group support) and debrief using the revealed answers.
  • Let the participants “play” with the online tool designed to help them implement the new initiative by assigning them control of the application through WebEx.  Alternately, this could be a post-course assignment to assist with skill transfer.

Now of course, all of this would make the session considerably longer and comfort breaks would have to be worked in, or the session broken up into smaller pieces (four 30 minute sessions would be my preference).

Why none of this could happen:

This is our busiest time of year, compounded by summer leave.  The timing of this new initiative couldn’t be worse.  As a result, we had to fight for the time to do the one-cheeked job we’re doing.

The initiative will be effective in August.  The training had to be completed before then.

There simply wasn’t time to roll this out differently given the tools and the resources we have.

This is why I often wish I was Shakti, one of the Hindu goddesses of multiple aspects and multiple arms 🙂  Then I might really be able to be in two places at once, doing two (or even three) jobs.  The word “shak” in Sanskrit means “to be able.”

Ah well, so much for dreaming 🙂

Timing is everything, they say.  Have you had a situation in which you’ve been “under the gun” with respect to training?  Were you able to pull a rabbit out of your hat or did you have to make do?  Is good enough really good enough?

That’s all from the Learning Mutt this week.

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Learning about learning coordination

/ Melanie Marttila / 3 Comments

There’s no guidebook or manual for what I do.  There’s no course that can teach me how to foresee the rough beast that slouches toward me, defend against it, or turn it away.

My title is training coordinator, and the main thrust of my job is to plan the year’s training, and try to keep everything within budget.  Along with that came a whole set of tasks that I was neither familiar nor comfortable with.

Still, I learned, I dealt, and I made the best of it.

My first big test was to plan the year’s training.  The skeleton was there, but surgery was required.  A titanium joint here, a transplanted bone there, the odd amputation and prosthesis, and voila: a training plan.  Call me Frankenstein.

Then I had to cost it all out given a reduced budget.

I did well though, made it through my first all-day meeting via conference call … for a moment there, I thought I understood what my job was all about.

I think I have to have another look at my job description.  There must be a clause in there somewhere that says “and all other duties as required.”  Or maybe the key phrase is “must tolerate ambiguity.”

I can do most of what’s been asked of me.  I can make pretty tables and Excel worksheets.  I can write proposals, and while my manager rewrites most of what I submit, that’s part of his job.  I haven’t quite learned to cater to my new audience yet.  Give me a defined task, and I’ll make it happen.  It’s all the little stuff that I wasn’t expecting that’s getting to me.  It’s all the chaos.  For a creative person, I don’t do chaos well …

It’s all the last-minute training that no one knows about until a week before it has to be delivered.  Add to that the reassignment of the training team to other duties (so no one to deliver the training) and the necessity of training nearly all the processing staff in the province, and you have a narsty beast indeed.

Though there’s a whole slew of other prioritized work that I need to get done, I’m stuck in scheduling hell.  Nearly 600 staff over 40 sessions, plus independent study groups.  My head spun with that alone, but then I was asked to co-facilitate 6 of the sessions.  Hey, I’m a trainer.  It’s what I did for 3 years.  I can hack it.

And then …  I was asked to do the invitations for all the sessions, and set up the sessions in WebEx because the trainers we recruited weren’t familiar with the technology.  It wasn’t what they signed up for, which is understandable.  They have their own overflowing workloads to deal with too.  Plus, each set of invitations I sent out returned half a dozen changes to the schedule. That is a lot of work for one person.  And it’s not over yet.

Once again, I’m managing.  I’m making it happen.  I’ve even made some suggestions in the event something like this happens in the future (which I think is inevitable).

Regardless what work they may have been assigned to, the best people to handle training is the training team.  They know the technology.  They’re experienced trainers.  They can set up their own sessions and create and send out their own invitations. If I was able to work with them, this training would have gone off without a hitch.  Well there’s still the schedule to consider, but I think that might be a problem under any circumstances (more on this in a moment).

With a team of 6, we could have rotated them through the sessions, so they still could have dedicated most of their time to their reassigned duties, the work would have been distributed, and everyone would have gotten what they needed to out of the deal … with a little compromise.

Failing that plan of action, we have to ensure that anyone recruited to deliver training will be able to fulfill all the duties that the training entails, such as setting up WebEx sessions and doing their own invitations.

I’ve figured out what to do about the schedule too.  Now this was my fault, because I didn’t think of asking for some key information that it turned out I needed.  Another learning experience.  That too, is on the books for “next time.”

For now, things are slowly starting to level out.  It’s still chaos, but it’s an organized kind of chaos.  The rough and slouching beast sits beside my desk, growing only occasionally, and I think we’ll all come out of this intact.  

This may sound like a blog-of-complaint, but I’m trying to keep this as a statement of facts rather than an indictment.  I’ll be fine.  These are just growing pains.  I’m essentially optimistic.  This has just been a heck of a couple of weeks.  It’s hard not to be overwhelmed when you’re … well, overwhelmed.

Had a trial by fire?  What did your rough beast look like?  Were you able to figure out a way to make things work?  Success stories welcome 🙂

I’m the Learning Mutt, circling three times and curling up for a nice nap.

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Learning elearning, the hard way :)

/ Melanie Marttila

Last time, on Breaking open the mind: I participated in my first real working group.

In March of 2011, my team received a gift: our first non-acting manager in years!  We’d gone through four in the past year alone and it was hell.  The manager that we started the year out with had been our acting manager for a while.  He knew the team and what we needed, but then he moved onto another position.  Then, we had a manager for all of three weeks before she also took on another position.

Finally, there were two other acting managers who, while well-meaning and perfectly competent, really didn’t feel comfortable in the role for the training team.  The manager that we’d had for such a short time the summer previous was successful in a competition and returned as our manager, but this time permanently.

So, a new manager, and a new fiscal year threw things into high gear.  Our budget was restricted.  No overtime, and certainly no money for travel.  We had to start looking at alternatives to in-class, instructor-led training if we wanted to be able to continue and continue to be relevant.

Thus working groups evolved for the SMART Board and WebEx, our two main tools that could be used to deliver virtual training, either synchronously (together), or asynchronously (independently).  To follow up those two courses was to be a third, regarding elearning design and the conversion of in-class course materials to online or virtual vehicles.

Though I was considered the go to person with regard to the SMART Board, I couldn’t legitimately volunteer for any of the working groups.  My father had recently passed away, and I had asked for several weeks of leave.  I wouldn’t even be around when the training would be delivered to our colleagues.

However, I did get a “consulting” role on both the SMART Board and the elearning groups.  I ended up designing a good portion of the pre-course modules for the SMART Board course, though I must say that Monica did a smashing job of finishing them off, and of the Notebook presentation and recording.  Sadly, I got little to nothing done with regard to the elearning design course.  Monica and Laura were left with the bulk of the work.

When I returned from my leave, however, there was tweaking to be done.  The SMART Board course was a success as it was, but the elearning, having been piloted, needed some rework.  For one thing, it was too long.  Laura was seconded to another working group, and so Monica and I set to.

Shortly thereafter, Monica was pulled onto the WebEx team, or rather became the WebEx team, leaving me to finish off the elearning.  Really, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

I can write though 🙂  So I wrote my way through, like I usually do, and ran the rest on instinct.

I turned the lectur-y, research-y bits into a search and learn pre-course module.  I crammed in metaphors a-plenty, drawing heavily on the resources that my manager threw my way.  I created a post-course assessment, and tidied up the elearning toolkit that Laura had created.

One critical piece I learned was the importance of storyboarding the presentation.  I scripted that sucker out to the last detail.  I also became fairly adept at PowerPoint, and incorporated Notebook activities into each module as review and assessment tools.

I learned a lot writing the course, but in the months since, I’ve learned much more, and I’d love the opportunity to go back and refine things a bit.

When time came to pilot the course a second time, there was only one of our colleagues left to attend, or offer input for review (Thanks, Sandy).  It seemed to go well, but there hasn’t been much call for the course since.  No sooner was I finished with elearning, though, and I was on to the next project.

More on that in a couple of weeks.  Next week I’m going to share a recent, bittersweet experience with you.

Interesting update: Our work of the SMART Board project has been recognized with a service award for our wee working group. (w00t!)

How has the era of reduced budgets and travel affected your training efforts?  Are you adapting courses for online delivery?  How is that working out for you?