Book Image

User Training for Busy Programmers

By : William Rice, William Rice
Book Image

User Training for Busy Programmers

By: William Rice, William Rice

Overview of this book

If you need to write a successful software training course and are unsure of how to start, then this book gets right to the point with clear, concise directions for developing an end-user software course. This step-by-step job aid walks you through the process of developing a successful, instructor-led software class. There are many good books on training theory. This book takes a more practical, condensed approach for when you don't have time to learn training theory. It is based on fifteen years of technical writing and training experience. In under 100 pages, the book guides you through the process of developing an end-user software course using a method that is tested, proven, and based upon sound instructional theory.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Practice Run


The best kind of practice run is giving the course to a portion of your audience. If you have the opportunity to give the course to a small audience, then do this.

If you cannot test the course on a subset of your audience, consider delivering the course to an empty room. That may sound strange, but this method works. Hearing yourself deliver the lectures and demos aloud is an effective way to test the material you’ve written. Time yourself. It’s an effective way to determine how long each lecture/demo will take.

Step through the student exercises. Do them in the same order the students will. Does the data from one exercise flow into the next? Are the functions used in each exercise covered in the lecture/demo? How long does each exercise take? After the practice run, you might want to revise your estimate of the course duration.

Finally, reset the computer(s) that you used during your practice run. Return them to the condition they should be in at the beginning of the class. This...