Six years ago, I worked as a corporate “B2B” trainer. I trained our sales staff in better ways to reach their clients. I also was to develop training materials for our retail sales staff to better serve the public. I was given certain tools to use. WebEx and PowerPoint presentations were the two models I could use. WebEx offered online collaboration and also the ability to give tests online. PowerPoint presentations were posted online for access 24/7.
This is where I first realized that the majority of our employees were not good at learning with “words.” This made sense since if someone was proficient learning with the traditional “verbal” teaching, they would probably had excelled in their education and would not be working at an automotive parts store. These were visual learners. They needed to be shown what needed to be learned. I tried to explain this to my “superiors” but since these forms of training worked for them (they were highly paid executives who probably did well in their own education) they could not understand the problem. I tried to create training videos and when put up against the PowerPoint training, the test scores rose dramatically. With this data in hand, I tried again to present my findings and request a change in the training materials. Because the cost of producing videos over creating PowerPoint presentations was considerable and not what the owner of the company felt was necessary (it would cut into the profits of the company) the whole training project was cancelled.
That is the extent of my exposure to media choices.
