I had one of those training workshops that started out shifty and turned out wonderful.

One work day before each workshop I send out an email reminder. The reminder has effected a marked improvement on attendance, and it gives people who overbooked a chance to back out gracefully and keep me from setting up twice as many laptops as I need (or standing in an empty room wondering where everybody is). In this case, I only had a small group registered for a “Presenting Content in Webcourses@UCF” session and one back-out. Oh well, I’ve only had three in a session before.

It turned out to be perfect.

The attendees were three of our HR staff who are in the process of adapting a face-to-face training system into an online program. They have their brick-and-mortar curriculum and an empty course shell.

This is what I live for.

Since they were the whole workshop, I scrapped the original topic and went over their curriculum. We determined what tools they will need, walked through customizing the interface, and talked about how to streamline their training process. For two hours we picked through the toolbox to find the best choices to meet their needs. We have a follow up scheduled to go over the assessment portion and fine-tune the learning module they learned how to create today.

It’s so rare that I get to do this kind of development, and it was *fun*. Fun to ask and answer and try out possibilities and see their eyes light up as I was able to tell them something that will make their lives easier. It was application instead of training. I need more days like this.