Instructor-led online micro-courses including live interaction with the other participants.
Live, in-person training has distinct advantages:
- Ease of interaction
- Non-verbal communication with other participants and with the instructor
- Immediate real-time access to the instructor for questions, clarification, and guidance
- The opportunity to mingle and interact during breaks
- The opportunity to customize the content to some extent on the fly, based on how the particular group of people is progressing or on specific questions or interests expressed by participants.
But…
- In-person training classes tend to be quite long. It’s difficult to absorb and internalize a large quantity of new information.
- The length of in-person training classes can have a large impact on day-to-day work.
- Usually there are travel costs – either you must travel to the place where the training is given, or the cost of the instructor’s travel is built into the price of the class
Self-guided online learning has advantages, too:
- Flexibility regarding time and place; no time lost to travel.
- The ability to control the pace at which you consume training materials (videos, hands-on exercises), to back up and repeat or to skip ahead.
- Online training can be significantly less expensive than in-person training.
But…
- A huge quantity of material is available online. Much of it is inaccurate, incomplete, poorly-explained, badly-produced, out of date, or otherwise problematic.
- There is no practical way to get immediate help if you have questions or you have problems running sample code or exercises, or if references cited in the self-guided learning materials are no longer available.
Our live, online training seeks to gain some of the advantages of both in-person and self-guided learning while mitigating the downsides of each:
- Ease of interaction – not as good as in person, but far better than self-guided learning on your own (because there is no interaction).
- Non-verbal communication – Not as good as in person, but with videoconferencing you can see and hear the other participants.
- Immediate access to the instructor – Yes.
- Mingle and interact during breaks – Not as good as in person, but a degree of interaction is possible through the videoconferencing setup.
- Customize content on the fly – Yes.
- Flexibility regarding time and place – Full flexibility regarding place, but classes are scheduled at specific times.
- Ability to control the pace – Limited, based on feasibility given expected content and available time.
- Control of costs – No travel costs for you and no reimbursement or price-padding to cover the instructor’s travel expenses.
- Curated material – no need to sift through mountains of online resources looking for meaningful and accurate sources.
- Class length – as the instructor need not travel to present the training, it’s feasible to divide the content into short segments that can be spaced out over time. This leaves time between sessions to think about and practice the new material. It also mitigates the impact on day-to-day work of having people in class.