It often causes me grief when I see a few hundred pages of material in a training course that is heavily used during a week's worth of class, then set on a shelf to rot when the class is over. Have any of you found a reasonable way to eliminate or significantly reduce the paper use in training courses?

Yes -- put the onus on the students for things like: gathering and creating their own notes, using existing materials and resources, and learning how to use online help and other online resources.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: LoveLearning,

Good start. I am a strong believer in participant-generated content. However, there are situations where it is not easy.

Consider a public course in a training facility on Programming in Java. There are some specific ideas to get across. The course provider wants all participants to get a virtually identical experience. Participants may not sign up until the day before the course executes. In such a case it is hard to have them gather material in advance.

Yes, they can gather some during class time, but it needs to be shared. If they are away from their offices (as in the public course at a training facility as I mentioned -- some may have flown from other states or countries), then the Internet is the primary or only source for reference. How do they share the info? Is there even a good Java reference with examples on the 'net? (Or consider "how to use brand new XXX tool, no on-line docs, yet.)

Would you provide laptops? (It would not be practical to restrict attendance to only those with laptops.) How do you handle annotation of the participant-found content? Would you use touchscreens? Would you capture it with EverNote?

I understand and want to use the web2.0 shared content creation concepts, but *how* would you implement it? iPhones?

There are other issues here... For example, why not start by examining why people aren't using the materials they get in training and exploring what people DO use after training?

Great suggestion.

We have found that the qualities that make great training materials do not necessarily make good "after course reference" materials. While participants refer to the notes they made, they generally prefer tighter, more concise references after the course and those tend to make poor course materials. (A dictionary is a great reference, but a lousy teaching tool, in general.)

Even some participants find their own notes hard to access after a course. They are not searchable, etc.

To some extent is a paradigm clash between the old "handwritten notes on a printed page" vs expecting reference material to be electronicly accessible.

For my own office, I think I will set up a personal web server and load it with electronic reference materials I have and links to others. Then I can access it with my iPhone from anywhere. Clearly, not all participants will have iPhones, but something like that might work in a classroom (if, for example, the screen were bigger).