Training Options (Part 4 of 4), Silverlight Courseware and Hibernate Courseware, Create STARs through training, Top Selling Courseware

Training Options (Part 4 of 4), Silverlight Courseware and Hibernate Courseware, Create STARs through training, Top Selling Courseware

Happy New Year!

In this inaugural 2009 issue, we have:

• An article on Training Options for the IT Professional (Part 4 of 4)
• Hibernate Courseware Details and Silverlight Courseware
• Create STARs through focused training programs for employees
• Top Selling Java Courseware and .NET Courseware

Have a Fantastic 2009,
Dan McCabe
Director of Training Sales
Intertech

Training Options for the IT Professional: Sorting Choices and Weighing Best Options

This article is the final installment of a four part series

How can virtual training be effective?

As a medium, virtual training appears better suited to advanced topics where the instructor serves as more of a tour guide and facilitator to students already familiar with the fundamentals and who are motivated to self-guided education. These topics don‟t require weeks of virtual classroom instruction, but just a few hours.

Organizations that believe the benefits of virtual training outweigh the liabilities should ensure that the following criteria is met before selecting a virtual training vendor:

• Training includes interactive content and students are engaged. This is sometimes called “blended learning” because e-learning is done as a reinforcement or preparation for a traditional classroom experience. A Thomson NETg Job Impact study in 2002 found that blended learning performance was 30 percent more accurate than e-learning alone; blended learning performance on the real-world task was 41 percent faster than e-learning along; blended learning was 159 percent more accurate than no training.
• Classes are designed for shorter classroom hours but spread over more time. Research studies have suggested that the average adult can “listen with understanding” for approximately 90 minutes, and “listen with retention” for approximately 20 minutes. The length of the latter observation varies somewhat with the education level of the individual. Generally, the lower the education level, the shorter the “listen with retention” period. Therefore, to be effective, elearning should teach a smaller amount of content over a longer period of time than traditional classroom instruction.
• Lecture materials are comprised of no more than 50 percent Power Point slides
• Frequent polling of the students to keep them focused and engaged. Polls can be done to get an answer to test their understanding, to get an opinion, or to build consensus.
• There is “edutainment” through the insertion of jokes, brain teasers (that may not be related to the content), or animations. When students sit in front of a monitor and listen to a voice on the other end of the phone, like it or not, the instructor is competing with mediums like TV and sites like YouTube.
• Materials include evaluation break points where the students’ understanding of the material is explored to make sure they are fully engaged. VanSickle (2003) recognized that a new online instructor should understand how the Internet has changed student expectations. These student expectations, described by Lansdell (2001), include increased levels of feedback, increased attention, and additional resources to help students learn. . . To successfully challenge the online student, increased communication is required between the instructor and student (White, 2000).
• There are end of session tests. These 10 or so question assessments help gauge if the student understands the topic. In addition, these assessments can be summed and shared with the group to share how the class-at-large is performing.
• Labs require students to work with each other or the instructor to promote the exchange of information and ensure participation.
• Pre-class training introduces students to the virtual training and gives them some guidelines about what to expect, how to participate and how best to take advantage of the e-training opportunity. Expectations should be set that virtual training is different from other types of training and requires different effort, action and etiquette.
• A portal dedicated to the class contains items like course schedule, links to outside resources, guidelines for any prep work, and assessments.

No Matter What Type of Training Delivery System: Some Important Commonalties
Like most things in life, successful training hinges on knowing your objective in advance. Employee learning objectives obviously need to support corporate goals and should be SMART, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented and on a timetable. For example, if your organization is switching from mainframe programming to a newer technology like Java, your employees‟ learning objective could be to reach a level of efficiency in Java that allows him or her to be Java certified within one month after finishing training.

For training to be effective, it should occur right before the new skills will be needed in the workplace. It‟s frustrating for employees not to be able to put new skills to work immediately after learning them, not to mention a poor investment for your company.

Corporate belt-tightening often targets training budgets as expendable fat. But there‟s plenty of ways to squeeze more from lean training budgets, which is much better than simply eliminating training altogether. Consider these strategies:

• Enroll multiple students--If you have more than one student in a training session, vendors typically will give you a price break. If you have a small organization and don‟t have multiple students, explore the possibility of working with business associates with similar training needs. By pooling your learners you could still qualify for a combined student discount.
• Consider block enrollments--Look into discounts for purchasing a block of enrollments with the same vendor at one time. These might be used during the course of a year but a cash-strapped training vendor will welcome the discounted cash payment in advance.
• Conduct the training in-house--When you only need to train six to eight employees, it may be more economical to purchase training for just your organization for a flat fee instead of the more typical “per student” fee. Vendors refer to this as “onsite” training. This is also an opportunity to think about pooling employees from other companies to share the costs.
• Look for special promotions--Most training companies offer e-newsletters that may contain specials. Sign-up for these newsletters. By having the information come to you, you won‟t miss opportunities or waste time continually checking the vendor‟s website for discounts.
• Be flexible--With give and take, everything is negotiable. For example, you could offer to send employees to one of several training sessions during the next few months in exchange for discounts. The vendor could then put your employees in a class that is being held with open seats. In this way, you get a better price and the vendor sells its unused capacity--similar to a cyber saver program.

Be Prepared
Before sending employees to a training class, make sure they know and have met the prerequisites. A student who isn‟t familiar with required prerequisites creates a frustrating experience for himself, the instructor and the other students. To make the most of training, ask for materials in advance. Encourage employees to review the materials and note their questions before they enter the classroom. By boning up in advance, employees will be better able to participate. Active participation and note taking increases retention.

The greatest benefit of instructor-led training is the instructor. Encourage your employees to take advantage of the training expert. They should ask work-related questions before class and during breaks. Sometimes the answers from this “free consulting” more than covers the training investment.

Keep Learning
Reinforcing learning after the training is essential for retention and practical application. Many companies require the employee to present an overview of recent training to other employees during an informal lunch session in the company conference room.

The Bottom Line
Maximizing the learning experience requires knowing your desired outcome, choosing a training delivery model that makes sense and is properly structured, being prepared and continuing to learn after training is completed.





Hibernate Courseware | Silverlight Courseware

Hibernate Courseware

Intertech’s Complete Hibernate course teaches students the most popular object-relational mapping framework for Java environments. Object relational mapping in large enterprise applications is difficult. The task is so difficult that the problem of storing and retrieving objects to a relational database has its own name – impedance mismatch.

In this class, students learn object-relational mapping concepts and the various issues and options available in Java to address object persistence. With these fundamentals, the course then explores the basics of Hibernate object persistence and configuration. It also digs into the details of Hibernate mapping, queries, transactions, and concurrency.

Not just a class that focuses on theory, this course is loaded with practical labs and deals with maintenance and performance issues. After taking this class, developers will be able to build faster, more flexible and easier to maintain application persistence layers and overcome impedance mismatch with the Hibernate framework.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the challenges of mapping objects to relational databases.
• Learn the architecture of Hibernate.
• Know how to setup and configure Hibernate for a Java project.
• Learn to map Java classes and object associations to relational database tables with Hibernate mapping files.
• Study Hibernate’s strategies for mapping Java inheritance trees to relational database tables.
• Learn the Hibernate Query Language and Criteria for retrieving Java objects.
• Explore Hibernate’s Caching Architecture

Hibernate Courseware Information...


Silverlight Courseware

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser and cross-platorm web-centric programming API which allows you to integrate extremely rich UI islands into a standard web application. Using Silverlight, developers can inject multimedia (video, audio, etc), user interactivity (games,gadgets) and other visual enhancements. Intertech's Complete Silverlight examines the role of the Silverlight SDK (1.0 and 1.1) and the numerous surrounding technologies (JavaScript, ASP.NET, XAML) and development tools (Microsoft Blend, Visual Stuio 2005/2008 templates) used to build Silverlight-enabled web content.

Learning Objectives

• Build Silverlight Enabled Web Sites
• Know the Capabilities of the 1.0 and 1.1 Silverlight SDKs
• Understand the Scope of the Silverlight API
• Make use of Microsoft Blend to author XAML
• Work with Visual Studio 2005/2008 Silverlight Project Templates

Silverlight Courseware Information...

Create STARs through focused training programs for employees

As you think about ways to increase efficiency, resist the urge to slash the professional-development budget line. There are many ways to squeeze value out of your training investment and still ensure employees develop the skills and knowledge they need to produce quality results. No. 1 is to use the STARs system.

Read the full article

.NET Courseware and Java Courseware Top Titles

The top-selling courses purchased by training firms throughout North America and Europe.


.NET Courseware
1. Silverlight Courseware
2. WPF Courseware
3. C# Courseware
4. VB.NET Courseware
5. ASP.NET Courseware
6. WF Courseware
7. LINQ Courseware



Java Courseware
1. Hibernate Courseware
2. Java Courseware
3. JSP Courseware
4. Java Web Services Courseware
5. iBATIS Courseware using RAD
6. iBATIS Courseware using Eclipse





www.IntertechCourseware.com info@intertech.com 800-866-9884 +23