Training is the activity of teaching someone a new skill, competency or knowledge with established, communicated and validated intentional learning outcomes. On this page, you can follow our guide to developing, delivering and updating training.
When training material is developed through a standardised, structured and incremental process, it can improve the experiences of those delivering and those receiving it. The steps below outline how you can start to develop your training material. These are based on Europeana’s full guidelines for delivering training and development, which are available in a Google document. Access the full guide or read on.
The first stage for developing training is the determination of the need for the training. What is the problem you are trying to solve? What would the ideal situation be after the training has taken place?
Your training needs can arise in different ways:
Practical needs indicated by users who request training on a specific topic (bottom up). To determine the impact your training would have on this group, work through the exercises of phase one of the Impact Playbook.
Strategic needs indicated by organisational priorities. Here, it is helpful to think through what it is that you are trying to achieve in the upcoming years. Where will training make the biggest difference? What other kinds of activities should be undertaken alongside the training to reach your strategic goal? The Capacity Building Playbook can be used to determine training needs from a strategic perspective.
Once you have gained a better insight in your initial training needs, it is time to look at these needs in more detail. We have created a Training Development Template to support you in this process. It asks you the most important questions to consider before the development of training can be started.
Make a copy of the template and fill it in. The template asks you to think about the following questions:
Impact: what is the impact of the training?
Users and use cases: who will benefit from the requested training and in what way will they be able to perform better than before the training?
Intended Learning Outcomes: what should trainees remember, understand, be able to apply after the training?
Learning pathway: does the training for part of a larger programme?
Training resources:
Existing training resources: what resources are there already available? If earlier training material is available, can it be remixed or used as a reference for the training that needs to be developed?
New training resources: what new resources will need to be produced and how will they be used for the delivery of training?
Timeline and actions: are there specific events or deadlines when the training should be delivered? And if so, what would the planning look like to go through the different development stages?
Contact information: who is involved in the development process and who will be the contact person for future updates?
Once you have completed the template, ask a colleague to review it. If you are developing training with Europeana, check whether the training fits with resources and training already in place.
There are a number of stages to go through when developing training materials. These are outlined below, but more detailed descriptions are available in the full guide.
Pre-alpha: develop and internally review the essential documentation needed for training resources.
Alpha: develop the first version of the training resource, which should contain internally tested written documentation and exercises, with illustrations and pictures.
Beta: based on your testing, improve the training resources, create additional ones, and test the training with at least one external cohort, including advertising the training to potential trainees.
V1 Public: give the beta material a final check; once it has been improved and validated, make it publicly available. Ensure that any videos are subtitled.
V2: update the material to reflect the latest information and/or feedback from users. Expand the offering with explainer videos for relevant chapters with subtitles.
V3: expand the potential audience by translating documentation and adding subtitles to videos in more languages.
Once your training resources have been developed and made available, it is time to offer the training. The main two ways to do this are instructor-led training and self paced training.
Instructor-led training can be organised by setting up your own training event(s) or by offering your training at other events. Explore our Events Toolkit for guidance on how to set up an event and submit it to the Europeana Pro events calendar through our form.
Self paced training requires training resources to be published and monitored. Even if people do the training themselves, at their own pace and time, they might need to be able to reach out to someone to get questions answered - make sure that you include contact information with your training resource.
Once you have delivered the training, how can you scale it up? You could increase capacity to deliver instructor-led training (train the trainer); offer your training in more languages (translation and localisation); or expand your training offer to support more extensive and/or different learning pathways. Additional information on all of these approaches is available in the full guide.
You have to measure the satisfaction of those who have taken part in or used training. Collecting satisfaction metrics is standardised across the Europeana Initiative. The question template you should use is as follows, with only one option allowed to be chosen.
To what extent are you satisfied with <the activity/service/event>?
Completely dissatisfied
Dissatisfied
Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
Satisfied
Completely satisfied
The % satisfaction = satisfied + completely satisfied
In the intake form (see Inventorisation) you will have determined the impact of your training too. If you want to receive more feedback from the trainees, use the Europeana Question Bank.
Training is rarely developed for static topics. Now that your training development has ended, it is time to think about the next version of your training. This could be updating and improving your training resources.
Review your training material at least once every year. Ask yourself the following questions:
Have there been any changes to the topic that require an update to the training resources?
Have there been any developments in Learning pathways that ask for any updates of your training resource(s) and/or delivery method?
The need to update training resources can also be triggered by changes you already anticipate (for example) update of software, or feedback from trainees, trainers and new insights you have gotten yourself.