Training seminar. With those two words, are you automatically picturing a stuffy classroom or roomy meeting room, full of adult learners gazing wearily at a PowerPoint while someone in a suit at the front of the room tries to toggle her slides and succeeds only in skipping forward to the end of the presentation before flushing red and asking for technical assistance? Well, dispel that image because the picture of training today is any entirely different one from that which has dominated the workplace for the previous two decades.By 2006, 3.5 million students were participating in on-line learning at institutions of higher education in the United States. The business world is following suit. Increasingly, employers are shifting to virtual, or electronic, methods of training their employees. These range from web-based to computer based training sessions, virtual classrooms and in-home options wherein a learner can log on to a website and guide themselves through their training session from the comfort of their pajamas and at their comfort-level and pace.
For mandatory company-wide training sessions such as sexual harassment prevention for supervisors and managers, the advent of “on your own time, at your own pace” electronic training delivery equates to greater participation and an increased record keeping ability as the training program tracks participant progress and can even gauge comprehension via testing. Such computer aided assessment range from automated multiple-choice tests to more sophisticated systems geared towards correcting a student’s specific mistakes wherein the computer directs the student through a series of questions adapting to what the student appears to have learned or not learned, bringing them ultimately to a more comprehensive understanding of the material.
Webinars are very popular in fields were information is key and is continually evolving, as with the legal, human resource, or medical fields. Learners need only set aside an hour of their time and log in to the session where they are given access to the views and ideas of top instructors and subject matter experts. While somewhat less interactive than traditional in-person training sessions, participants are invited to instant message in questions to the presenter, in addition to participating in online polls that quickly tabulate electronic responses from all attendees to demonstrate trends.
With the advent of e-learning, geography no longer matters and multinational corporations with employees that speak a variety of languages can create a seminar that guides every employee through the same training session. Suddenly, the world really is our e-oyster!