Anyone writing their own training curriculum ?

[cparsons]

Hi all,

We are a 60 person firm and we have 3 projects going in Revit, all them in DD.
We have put 8 people through training using a Revit consultant. He was great but is no longer available to train our staff. We'd like to train the next round of Reviteers ourselves and were wondering what if any resources exist out there for putting together a curriculum? We have the outlines from our Revit consultant but we'll probably need something more in depth.

I'll be happy to post what we develop with the group on the Revit Wiki. If you don't know about it you should check it out. Great work by Beau Turner and crew (too many to name) - http://www.tripleddesign.com/wiki/index.php/RB_Main.

Thanks,
Chris

[janunson]

Try your Autodesk Reseller - many of them put together training books and some of them may sell you the book to use yourself. There are a few available on Amazon.com too... we've got them all, not necessarily things you can teach a class from, but some people learn better if you just give them a book to follow.

[Teresa.Martin]

Dear Chris;
You might want to check out this link for your needs.

http://www.ascented.com/

Best regards,

[ram.91130]

Here are some best practices user guide thought
might be useful for u

[rod.74246]

I feel pretty slack, but we do our own in house training and haven't ritten a curriculum. Basically i just go off the cuff along he general lines of the training manuals. Except really emphasis the do's and don'ts we have picked up along the way.

Honestly i think its more important to show people what it can do and then do a "jump in the deep end" sort of thing. I really beleive peope don't learn all that well following a course closely. I really think 2 weeks struggling with a real project has a lot more learning potential than a month of training.

Revit is fairly intuitive to use once you get the hang of how it works i think

[sbrown]

I think we've learned that on the job training is the only way to make it happen. Mass training without being on a job is great for exposure to what the software can do, but does little to advance the user base.

In the Orlando office we do a lunch and learn type project based training. Everyweek(or almost) we work on a project, then assign homework. So we take a real job, I created the base file, then each week we show a tool you would use in the process of the job from start to finish, then the students have the week to re do what was demonstrated but in their own design. Then we discuss what worked and what they had trouble with.

[kparks140020]

My office is currently going through Revit training with our reseller, but we understand that to get experience all trainees need to developer their projects in Revit not ADT. Weekly question and answer sessions are planned for the next several weeks. We do not have an office training manual, (other than what we received at training), but we are developing office Revit standards. I'm excited about this change to Revit.

[brd]

In the Orlando office we do a lunch and learn type project based training. Everyweek(or almost) we work on a project, then assign homework. So we take a real job, I created the base file, then each week we show a tool you would use in the process of the job from start to finish, then the students have the week to re do what was demonstrated but in their own design. Then we discuss what worked and what they had trouble with.

The lunch and learn method is the same approach we're taking in my office. I was sent to AU with the exact goal in mind of teaching these lunch and learns after wards. The problem I run into is that I can't keep the sample projects relevant to the issues we're running into with our ongoing projects. We just started a fresh wave of projects in the office, so I coincided the start of this lunch and learn series so that the lessons would be immediately relevant in our current projects, however those projects are developing faster and the lunch and learn topics are quickly becoming outdated. The beauty of the approach at first was that I didn't have to assign "homework" so to speak because the staff's projects were going to demand they learn these lessons anyway. Now I'm getting forced to decide between teaching the lessons I had planned and just assigning a little homework assignment, or jump way ahead in my planned outlines and end up skipping lots of information. I don't know what to do at the moment, it feels like my whole game plan is unraveling on me.

[cosmickingpin]

Sounds familiar to me:
http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=16769


The lunch and learn method is the same approach we're taking in my office. I was sent to AU with the exact goal in mind of teaching these lunch and learns after wards. The problem I run into is that I can't keep the sample projects relevant to the issues we're running into with our ongoing projects. We just started a fresh wave of projects in the office, so I coincided the start of this lunch and learn series so that the lessons would be immediately relevant in our current projects, however those projects are developing faster and the lunch and learn topics are quickly becoming outdated. The beauty of the approach at first was that I didn't have to assign "homework" so to speak because the staff's projects were going to demand they learn these lessons anyway. Now I'm getting forced to decide between teaching the lessons I had planned and just assigning a little homework assignment, or jump way ahead in my planned outlines and end up skipping lots of information. I don't know what to do at the moment, it feels like my whole game plan is unraveling on me.

[Mike Hardy-Brown]

Also have a look at some of the Revit Blogs

[dhurtubise]

We do in house training and i have a lot of documented stuff. We keep it on the intranet for easy access and updates.
Training is split in section (general, families, etc.).

[Andre Baros]

We've taken a back seat approach to training. I learned Revit first and then trained a second person by simply being available to answer his questions, back seat driving as much as required. He learned on real projects and I didn't develop any curriculum because those projects dictated what would come next. The third person to learn had two back seat drivers, the fourth three, etc.

The one at a time approach has had several key benefits.
1. Time, No up-front time for me to set up lessons and teaching time is in very small chunks so it is less disruptive.
2. Teaching helps you learn. As each new person becomes a teacher, they learn more by passing on knowledge.
3. When I'm not around, theirs a network of help available.

There have also been some real drawbacks and hurdles:
1. Time, people seam to have the most questions when everyone is really busy, it's still ok to ask and it's still best to ask for help, but they sometimes don't because they don't want to disturb other peoples work so they take extra time figuring things out on their own. Not bad in the long term but costly in the short term.
2. Levels of Revit. It's easy to finish a project without ever running into certain functions or work arounds which is great for you but not for the next person who runs into a problem which you can't answer. Each of our Revit users has had radically different experiences.
3. Levels of Revit. As is so often noted on this forum, people hit stages where they can cruse along and think they've got it all down, then they hit a new level of functionality and they feel like they can't get anything done. Without a structure program, you hit these new levels at surprise moments, and often don't see them coming. ie, the door schedule was SOOO easy but now I want to kill myself trying to do this light and vent schedule, or the drawings need to go out tonight and I just changed this one little thing and now the sections are all wrong and I don't know what I did, what did I do?

I would still recommend rolling Revit out to small groups at a time so that you don't get to far ahead of your best users.

[cparsons]

Thank you all for your replies! I have come across two more solutions:

Video Tutorials by Cyril Verley

These are great because you are charged on a per login basis. You get 1000 logins for 150 bucks and when you run out you can just refill. http://www.autosupportdesk.com/

Autodesk Official Training Courseware

You should be able to order this from your reseller. Apparently they are often backordered (like right now) but worth it once you get your hands on them.