How do you train students?

I set out on a mission a few weeks back to discover a

better way to make our materials available to students.  This was prompted by a student in one class remarking that if we're "..going to use digital materials, then you need to go all the way".  I'm probably paraphrasing but that's what keeps ringing in my head! (thanks kate)

I've done a lot of searching, talking with software reps, and even attempted to modify some technical documentation software to fit what I want. After all that, the final solution wound up being SharePoint.

For various reasons, none of the previous items fit the bill.  We're not even going with SCORM based training.  It's going to come down to using pages, Office Web Apps, hosted media, and a tiny bit of scripting added to a Master Page to get the Quicklaunch I want.

I think this is really a testament in some ways to the effort that Microsoft has been putting into SharePoint as a platform.  Don't get me wrong! I'm very cross at MS for the patches I spent 3 hours this morning backing off my machine so I could talk on Lync and post to SharePoint from Word again.  They don't do everything right.  I'm also still fighting with using the web services from Python.  Those are completely different projects though. In the end SharePoint is exactly what we need.  Here's a preview of what our training will look like in the near future.

 

 

There's a lot of work in the background that isn't very evident from the screenshot. Not the least of which is Extranet Collaboration Manager which is making all of this possible.  I can't wait to get students into it.  What platforms do you use for training?  external or internal?

by noreply@blogger.com (Robert Schley) via SharePoint Solutions Blog