Rethinking training materials

When I joined our team they had ceased offering face-to-face training for our research systems as take up was apparently not that great. Instead, training was offered in the form of guides and cheat sheets.

My contribution to this was to divide and conquer. I noticed the same content was appearing across multiple of these guides, so I set to extract sections into sub-documents that I would maintain and update, then I would build the larger guides from these.

We’ve been requested now to look outside the box, or rather can we look beyond the guides and consider smaller bite size modules staff can consume to learn how to perform tasks. These may take the form of videos, presentations it just more visual acrobat documents.

The team has decided to explore SharePoint pages to deliver content, however when I explored using PowerPoint show documents I was less than impressed the show opened inside PowerPoint rather than showing s as they normally do. Maybe not the path forward. I exported that to presentation quality MP4, to my amazement the file size was entirely reasonable. So far, the mini site I’ve created as a mix of MP4 and PDF visual instructional is looking good, just waiting on team feedback.