Skip to main content

Throwing chocolates at the audience

 A few years back I worked with a consultant as a freelance trainer. They said they were content specialists. And that they would want to work with expert facilitators and so on. And I said yes. 

Then they got their client, supposedly understood the requirements and came up with a content pack for 4 hours. 

I went through the content and the content was a pot pourri of slides. There was no structure or framework. All the content was unattributed images from Google with a single text line (after all that was the latest in slide design). Every few slides there was an engagement activity (sometimes directly connected with the topic at hand - at other times irrelevant). Then there were quizzes where chocolates had to be thrown to the audience for answering correctly or making the right points. And there were group discussions where the audience was grouped into teams and left to discuss. Then there were role plays. 

The entire content was grouped like a bad movie. A set of activities, breaks between segments of theory, chocolate throwing, back slappaing. Imagine a movie with the right "ingredients" for a plot but a bad story. 

But to be fair, this was what training was some years back. If you engage the audience well, your smile sheets are marked well and you get repeat business.  And in order to keep the ratings up, I had to think on the fly and create things that were never accounted for in the content pack to ensure that the audience learned. 

And oh, the content pack was made with Google. Type in, pick the first thing that appears, add a jazzy image and put it on the slides. No references, no research, nothing. 

After conducting a few sessions, I hastily bid goodbye because as a trainer.

So, yes throwing chocolates at the audience doesnt work and if you are doing that, you are not a trainer. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

And the unconference happened

 Most conferences have an agenda. No, not the stated agenda, but an agenda of marketing, airtime to sponsors, ensuring the past and future customers are invited, of ensuring that the "stars" of the industry are invited and attention showered of them. All in all it is a your scratch my back, I scratch your back syndrome. Some of these become cliques and claques and therefore the real point behind a conference is lost. And then there is the unconference - organised and run by the alumni of the ISABS ODCP program. And as the name suggests, this is truly an un-conference organised by the alumni, for the alumni. No funders - except the alumni themselves. No sponsors. Just the team.  I havent seen a more tastefully organised conference (yes, its an unconference).  To begin with - the location - not a typical star hotel, but an outdoorsy place. The food - simple. The welcome - personal. It was like a homecoming. The setting was warm and welcoming. It was a smaller conference. Ju...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why does elearning exist?

 Elearning is one of those niches that does not deserve to exist. Yes, it was a novelty 20 years ago, but not now. It cannot exist. But somehow it does. Disclaimer: I used to head a content team once upon a time. And I used to ask those whom I hired - tell me the last thing you learnt from an e-learning. The answer is - pretty much nothing (and this is a good decade ago).  Why?  If you want to learn a recipe, you go to Youtube, or Reels or something like that. If you are terribly old fashioned - as in, you read - then you go to a website and read the recipe and make it.  Most other things you learn by doing or learning on the job or asking an expert.  If you have to learn something in depth, then there are other ways.  So, where does e-learning fit in all this? E-learning is one of those products that the customer hates, but has no choice, because someone has decided it is the best way. For instance, you have to learn a new CRM or some other product - you w...
Post a Comment
Read more