The death of training: new strategies for user education

I have not come to praise User Training, I have come to bury it. Declining attendance at training classes has been noted at many institutions despite continuing increases in numbers of users and the variety of supported and unsupported application packages. I would further argue that the " traditional " formats and scheduling of formal training have proved increasingly inadequate for this breadth and depth of computing activities. This " techno-spread' combined with the natural urges of users to do it on their own or with peers has made formal Computer Center-sponsored user training less and less usefil. Yet there are still many thinga that users must or at least ought to know about their environment they're unlikely to pick up from the streets and backalleys. This paper reviews some of the " post-Training " trends under the more general rubric of User Education and examines strategies for Academic Computing Centers to provide the resources and new opportunities for appropriate learning in the post-training age and discusses the pros and cons of some new approaches. Topics covered include " User Acquisition " , new formats for tutorials, divisional-and curricular-based organization, cooperation with libraries and academic departments, liaisons and user groups, " found material, network groups, multimedia for training, and a number of others. THE MYTH OF THE USER ~~G CLASS Once upon a time...There was a great triumvirate of user suppofi personal consulting, documentation, and user training. Consulting could be done one on one because we knew all our users, we could write custom documentation because there were few programs, and everyone was eager to attend training classes done in the classic lecture style of the XIIth century because that was the only way of learning. Now...We don't have time to consult with every user with a problem now, there are thousands of manuals and books yet no one reads documentation except as a last resort, and.. .we still offer user training courses. Training courses in the same formats as ten and twenty years ago. Training courses which, as a percentage of total computer users and a portion of the total things one can do on computers, are abysmally underattended, underoffered, and ineffective. Many academic computing organizations have seen a decline or leveling of interest in computer center-sponsored training courses. This can be measured by the numbers who sign up, the numbers who show up, and the post-course interest levels …