Sunday, January 27, 2013

Flip the Agile classroom

You have a large organisation with a few thousand people and you want to train them on basic Agile concepts.

What are your options?

Typically this means a lot of instructor-led training.  Let's call that $1600 / person for 2 days.

And what do you typically get?  From experience, I'll describe it as pretty hit and miss.

Here's an alternative.

Well-designed online training and assessment. Let's call that at most $50 - $100 / person and this is not considering any enterprise licensing.

Tack on facilitator-led practices to validate understanding of concepts.  That still might be $1600 / person but it's more likely to produce a useful result.

So why hasn't anyone does this yet?

5 comments:

  1. Only training I've been to that I found valuable was rather more in cost ($5k/week a person) but wasn't specifically Agile. I'd love to see online training that was actually strongly recommended down (never been anywhere that actually used agile but must just my industries..) and then like you said, followed up with facilitated in-person training.

    But then again, most places I've been at, not many cared for training or seemed to get much out of it.

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  2. I like the model of training the trainers and then letting them go on and train others.

    Online training is a model that works when people want to motivate themselves to learn. It requires buy in and can be wasted. Maybe that's why. Also, don't we tell people that agile is about talking to real people?

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    1. If people don't want to learn, I'm not sure live training will be any better.

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  3. I actually provide Agile training which means I might have a self serving point of view, it might also mean I have some insight here.

    I kind of have this quandary right now. One of the companies I work with are adding online versions of their courses and they would like me to do so too. Right now I'm reluctant to do so because a) its a lot of work and I don't know if it will sell and b) I'm not sure I want to give that experience, to explain....

    I think the discussion and conversations team members have on my courses are very valuable, even if I say nothing. When I have a whole team, or a cross section from a company, they can learn together and create a shared view, understanding, even vision.

    I don't see that working in an online environment where they all learn alone.

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    Replies
    1. Part 1 of Flip the Classroom is the online portion, which can actually allow for interaction in online form OR in the form of teams learning online together. Part 2 of Flip the Classroom is guided practice by a live teacher.

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