Anyone else here really, REALLY hate the sort of “narrated slide show” style of training videos where some dork reads out what’s on the screen, but you can’t fast forward past it once you’ve read the short paragraph, and have to listen to the entire thing that the narrator reads like a sedated sloth. And then, once you’ve suffered through it, you have to click “Next” or something, and it all starts over again.
Ultimately, you end up spending an hour on this garbage, when it’s like 15 minutes of actual information if you were to read it in a pamphlet, and for me anyway, I’d retain it better. I find after I’ve read the sentences, the narrator gets the “Charlie Brown Teacher Voice” and I stop paying attention to the whole thing until I hear silence, and then I go check it and click “Next” or “Continue”.
It strikes me that it’s possible that this works better for some people than just reading something, but for me it’s torture. And it seems like everywhere I work/volunteer, it’s always the same repeated crap year in and year out. Scout youth protection training, HIPAA training, Cybersecurity training, etc… it’s this same horrible online training method.
Every now and again, one of them screws up and lets you skip to the end, which saves a lot of time and annoyance for me- I read the paragraph, skip past the droning narration, and go on. I do about the same on the little quizzes they give us anyway.
OSHA 10 & OSHA 30 was that way. 10 minutes of information that they make you take an hour to listen to. I turned the sound off and played 2048 until I could hit Next.
I’m a software developer. I have had to do these things for training for client work.
I have a simple secret, which may or may not help… when you get to the ‘questions about the video’ part… very few of these questionaires do a POST to the remote server on each ‘question’ in the quiz pages.
They very, very, often rely on simple Javascript, and even more commonly, on error messages hard-coded into the HTML source.
As I can read HTML (and really, anyone can) and I can locate the error messages “hidden” in the source code, I can work out the answers quite easily.
I very rarely get less than 100% on these things. I have a dual monitor setup so I can concentrate on real work while the video plays in my side vision.
Edited to add: the one piece of training software that did do a POST to the server on every answer… was designed exceptionally badly, and POSTed both my answer, AND the correct answer.
I got 100% on my second attempt after opening the HTTP request console in my browser.
I found that on some of them, you could switch to an outline mode for the slides. From there, I was able to select each slide, read it, then select the next one. I could buzz through pretty quickly that way.
I think someone, somewhere in every organization feels that their training is the most important thing in the world, so they create these trainings to REQUIRE the viewer to sit thru a set amount of time for each slide, to make damn sure the content presented has some chance of sinking-in. That, or there is some regulatory requirement that viewers must spend a certain amount of time with the training, and no less than that will do.
I have to sit through about eight of those every year, on various topics. The way that the agency has them set up, you usually can’t skip forward. They’re longer than they need to be, and repetitive, but if I don’t do them, I wind up on the “naughty list,” so I grit my teeth and get them done.
Last time I was required to do this sort of training, it was for bias awareness. Most of what they told you would be pretty obvious to someone who wasn’t a completely oblivious bigot.
Luckily, I discovered that they had an option to take the quiz at the end first, and if you passed the quiz, you didn’t have to sit through the presentation.
I’ve attended live classes that were like this. Hated it. When I developed some training courses that I presented (actual subject matter technical training), I always made sure to talk about the information on the slide and never just read them. The trainees got the slides as a hard copy so they could refer to them again, if they needed/wanted to.
Fortunately, most of the regulatory training (like safety, info security, sexual harassament etc) we had were video enactments and were a bit more engaging. But, yeah, after taking them year after year, if allowed, I would skip to the test.
I write and occasionally narrate courses like this, and both these ideas are essential. The slides should ideally be just an outline, and shared beforehand to give viewers a framework for their own notes.
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That, or there is some regulatory requirement that viewers must spend a certain amount of time with the training, and no less than that will do.
True in my profession.
As a trainer and instructor, I’m interactive. When I teach students how to present, I focus on the question, “What makes it better to have this training than to get a document in my email?”
When I am in a classroom/group setting and the tedious slideshow starts up, I realize that it just isn’t cost effective in some situations to personally train each individual at their own pace,and they pretty much have to go for the lowest common denominator when it comes to the target audience in order to reach as many as possible.
It seems to me that paradoxically, the less intuitive/less critical stuff is also the most time consuming and stultifying. The more critical stuff seems to be more apt to let you just read it and skip ahead.
I do a lot of work in dangerous environments, so I get why we have to go through safety training. You don’t want people with no training in a manufacturing plant where the worst thing that could happen is basically another Bhopal disaster (a few thousand killed and about half a million injured, for those that don’t know what I’m referring to).
So I don’t really complain that I have to go through training.
But what gets me is that everyone builds their safety training around OSHA. I have gone through OSHA training. I scan my OSHA card and send it in to the safety folks at the plant, so they know I have been through OSHA training. Then I have to go through that company’s training, which is basically the same as the OSHA training because it’s all based on the same safety standards. So there’s another couple of hours to certify that I know what I already have proven that I know by giving them a copy of my OSHA card.
Then I get to go through site-specific training, 99 percent of which is the same as the OSHA training and the company specific training.
I have literally had to sit through 8 hours of training videos to go on site going over the exact same material 4 or 5 times. Then I go to a different company and different site and have to sit through several more hours of training videos, again, all based on OSHA so it’s the same basic thing over and over and over and over again.
All because some a-hole thinks that their training is the most important thing in the world.
Twenty years ago, you’d show up on site, they’d shove you in a tiny room with a TV and a VHS player, and you’d watch a 15 minute safety video that had been played so many times that it was nearly worn out. Then you’d take a 5 minute quiz and be done with it. 20 minutes, easy peasy. Not this 8 hours of bullshit like we have now.
Part of my job is doing online training. Every course I design is put together so that I am NOT reading slides; what I am saying about a slide and what is actually ON the slide must, must be different. Either I should be describing and explaining a picture/diagram/example, or if the slide is text, it’s something the audience can read and absorb quickly, and what I’m saying fills in the gaps and provides additional explanation.
That was certainly my attitude as well, and I think that used to be considered the right way to do things. I can remember following guidelines that there should never be more than x words on a slide, for example.
However, at least in the work environment I was in for that past 5 or 10 years that I worked in an office setting, things had changed: everyone WANTED ridiculously detailed slides with every damn word the presenter was saying written on them.
The reason for this is so that people don’t have to take notes - they concentrate on the presenter and the slides and don’t try to scribble down concepts at the same time. It’s understood that everyone receives a copy of the slides at the end, rendering note-taking unnecessary.
Mind you, I’m not saying I agree with this method. To me, you might as well dispense with the presentation entirely if that’s your approach - just give people the damn slides and let them read them at their leisure. But I was clearly in the minority, because everyone did it that way.
When I had to present, I used one set of outline slides for the talking part, and handed out a detailed version afterward for people to keep. (And told people at the start that I was going to do so, so they knew they didn’t need to take notes.) That was my compromise.
This week I had to go through the annual “preserving corporate information” training. This year, they’ve added an option to do a “pre-test” and skip the rest of the training. I figured, why not, it’ll only be 3-4 questions. But no, it was 12 somewhat-easy questions, and I had to get 100% on the pre-test in order to skip the boring main training.
As the pre-test dragged on, I started realising that, if I didn’t get 100%, I would have to go through the main training and the time spent doing the pre-test would be lost forever. I guess it’s one way to add excitement to a boring training session about not leaving your laptop unlocked. (I nailed it !)
We were recently reminded about a specific online training we were to complete in order to retain program access.
Not only was it reading straight from script, it was AI reading. Absolutely horrible. Couldn’t click forward, so at least I was able to work while the fake voices were mispronouncing many words between slides.
Expected a test at the end, nope. Thank heavens.
This same training used to be read by a state worker we called “Ichabod”. He was tall, emaciated, and as friendly as a rabid weasel. His voice was beyond sonorous. Absolutely no inflection. I’d rather have Ichabod back.
I will wager that all the “required” training you have to go thru for your job is likely the result of lawsuits - so any place you are working will require you to take “their” training, so if anything bad happens, they can say, “Well, ecg DID take our training, but he musta screwed up, so it’s all on him, and our company has plausible deniability here…”
I suspect the timed trainings we have to do all have to do with lawsuits - the company can say “99.99% of our workforce has completed XX training and spend XXX hours doing so. We have done our best to ensure blah blah blah…(so we cannot be sued)”
