Transactional Trainers and Web2.0
Posted by mullygrub on April 25, 2008
A dilemma I came across recently was that of the transactional trainer in an e-Learning 2.0 environment. Do transactional trainers fit in this landscape? My answer after being subjected to an online lecture is, well, no not really. Can a “banking” concept of learning fit in what is essentially a collaborative environment? I believe that a change of mindset is required, otherwise we are behaving as “the sage on the stage” but in an online environment, and I don’t think our learners will put up with that. We have to raise the bar. Our audiences are not captive when they are online, we need to engage our learners rather than just dumping information on them.
So how do I go about changing a transactional trainer’s mindset when hosting a webinar? I certainly don’t have a solid (or wobbly for that matter) answer, and I can’t seem to find any cheap easy tricks for now. The key, I think lies within educating the transactional trainers about social e-Learning theory, but how? I know that I am pretty attached to my personal theories about how people learn, and I would be devaluing these trainers to suggest that they hold any less conviction about their beliefs than me. If the trainers are not familiar with technology, maybe it is a matter of immersing them in the environment, and running sequential short online webinars about how to teach using technology. I think that getting them to run some five minute recorded practice sessions, which they watch back and reflect on with the group may help. This could be done several times, with their progressive efforts compared to their previous ones to show development. If they are already operating in the environment, maybe we could surreptitiously compare some “happy sheet” scores from the “presented” versus “facilitated” webinars and take discussion from there? Or if all else fails, maybe I can treat them to one really long didactic webinar about the importance of interaction with all annotation and chat functionality turned off and they can get a taste of “death by webinar” 
