[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Costs/Staff training/testing

[Lori Ayre]

One of the things we've been discussing is the need for a training  
server with known data so that it is easier to do exercises in which  
the students must  accomplish something rather than just "play  
around." That way we could share our exercises and you could trust  
that they would work (cuz the right data is there.)

Does that have appeal to others?

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 15, 2010, at 7:17 PM, Tara Robertson <information.detective at gmail.com 
 > wrote:

> Dan said:
> To add one more voice to the mix; during the months leading up to our
> go-live date, our cataloguers had weekly training / exercise sessions
> where each week we went over the previous week's tasks and then
> introduced some new tasks with practice exercises. When we went live,
> they were in a relatively happy state. Kudos to Ron Slater, who put
> together the training schedule, and the cataloguers for tackling it  
> with
> good spirits and humour.
>
> When I did training with SITKA, we learned from the first few sites  
> that giving library staff access to a training server and telling  
> them to "play around" didn't result in staff spending time  
> practising using the system. We then developed worksheets where  
> staff would have to do various tasks like: register a patron, check  
> out 3 books, mark one lost, observe the change in bills, etc. We  
> found that structured exercises worked better for most library staff  
> than just telling them to "play". (I'm not sure what, if anything,  
> this says about the kind of folks who work in libraries, or how  
> people in libraries learn how to use software, but...) Perhaps if  
> the SITKA folks are still using these types of exercises they might  
> be willing to share them?
>
> I've also found this to be a useful way to teach other types of  
> software, like Zotero, and Excel.
>
> Cheers,
> Tara
>
>