Looking for magic - hoping for inspiration: what we learned from our training survey

Abstract

What do you do when the attendance in all of your workshops drops to fifty percent? This isn't a sudden drop. It is something that you notice has been happening over several semesters. These are workshops that you've been offering for years. Does that mean that you've saturated the campus? Or, are your workshops old and out dated? You've been revamping them to the new versions of software, but has that been enough?. Are you meeting the training needs that people are expecting? What are those training needs? Are those training needs what you thought they were? Are you offering workshops at the right time? Should you be offering evening and Saturday workshops?. These are all questions our department, Instructional Services at the University of Kansas, found ourselves asking about the workshops that we offer. During the spring and fall semesters, we offer a range of over 40 different types of workshops with about 100 workshop time frames during the semester. These workshops are open to faculty, staff and students as well as KU affiliates. During the past several semesters we've noticed a dramatic decrease in attendance. We wanted to take a hard look at our workshops. We put together several different surveys targeted specifically at faculty, staff and students. We planned to make these surveys available through a new feature in our portal that everyone at KU has the ability to access with authentication. We will share our results and how we changed our workshop structure.