ILTA White Papers

ILTA White Paper Firm University 26 The good news is that there are plenty of very cheap and even free tools and resources available to facilitate successful learning. For Microsoft Office, trainers can reliably look to office.Microsoft.com for anything and everything related to Office. Webcasts, podcasts, self-paced training courses, handouts — you name it — are available for free, and the site is more useable and updated than ever before. Mining resources you already have is another option. Utilize the help files within software programs by creating a manual of that information as a PDF or Word document. Polish and rearrange as needed, add a table of contents, post on the intranet and voila! — a training manual materializes for little to no cost. Then, go a step further and take the topics that are heavily requested but perhaps buried deep in the middle of the manual, and create single-task quick reference cards as PDFs for posting on the intranet or to print as handouts. Another important point to remember is that you are not limited to what's available within your own firm. There are groups that offer free training, such as ILTA, PLTG and the New York Word Legal User Group (NYWLUG). Additionally, vendors often have extensive free training resources (such as Lexis/ Nexis CaseMap and InterAction), so don't forget to ask your vendors what they may offer, or see if you can negotiate getting training included in the purchase price. Another idea for "shopping your closet" includes looking to other departments within the firm for materials and resources. Perhaps Professional Development has an LMS to track CLE compliance, which you may be able to gain access to. Look around, and find ways to cooperate. The tools you have as a trainer on a budget are thankfully quite good. Creating and delivering training with Word, PowerPoint, Publisher, Capitvate, Jing, SharePoint and to a lesser extent, Excel, can be done well. Often you can create material in one program and then repurpose it using others, which allows you to keep the material in front of learners, and it provides more accessibility by different learner styles. For example, you might create some material in Word, record an e-learning session using Jing that you post to the intranet, put a brief version in the weekly newsletter and finally create a self-paced tutorial. While Adobe Captivate is not free, it may be worth the investment, as you can use it to easily create e-learning sessions, assessments and interactive tutorials. If free sounds better, Jing at www.jingproject.com, has slightly less flexibility than "the good news is that there are plenty of very cheap and even free tools and resources available to facilitate successful learning." click here to download the "Training on the Cheap" Resource Guide filled with tips, tricks, links and more. "Training on the Cheap" Resource Guide

• Cover