After years steeped in the debates of elearning vs classroom and 2.0 vs formal training, I had my first experience in years of a two-day classroom course. In consultancy skills.
On one level, it ticked all the boxes for the kind of cliches writers like Donald Clark rail against - icebreakers, breakout groups filling flipcharts, lots of handouts, references to learning styles, and a big dose of NLP.
Was it so awful? Would I have learned this stuff better by other means? A large amount of it was conceptual and theoretical - models and structures. Yes I could have picked these up easily from blogs. But what I would have lost was the trainer's stories. The trainer was an experienced business consultant with a wealth of anecdotes illustrating and supporting the conceptual stuff. These were delived both in a planned way and in response to the group's questions (and, I must say, in a pleasant and engaging way). So that was a plus. Another was that this trainer made absolutely minimal use of Powerpoint and the flipchart - the main engine of the course was conversation, sitting at the table. That was also good.
