Blended learning - advice for a new and dangerous journey

I do this with all of our instructor led courses (mostly technical). I take the outline and all of the materials and build a website for the course. The website acts as an interface to all of the materials be it PowerPoint, PDF, video, audio or elearning  module. Then as the class progresses, the instructor works through the website with the students. 

The students respond very well to this because it's very natural for them to look up stuff on websites. Depending on the course, sometimes these websites will be live on our intranet and other times we will have them load the site directly onto their local PC (if we know they will need to access the information in an offline state). Most students heavily leverage it as a performance support tool as they are transitioning their knowledge from the classroom to the "real world". 

I've recently started toying with SharePoint workspaces to see if we can begin to use that instead. So far I have mixed feelings regarding the capabilities. 

I am doing something similar to this now so I can share a couple things with you.

I'm not sure of the logistics based on your post so this may or may not apply to what you are doing.

We do not include the resource documents with the course(s). We include instructions on how to access the documents. We do this for 2 reasons, which may just be specific to us.

For most of our technical courses, we also have an abundance of on demand type materials (quick reference guides, short tutorials, etc) that employees can use when they need help to complete a task on the job (instead of having to go back to view an entire course). An underlying goal in all of our full courses is to also teach the end-user where to go for help when they are in the middle of a task and not just taking the course. So for one, we don't want to attach the resources and then end up with multiple versions floating around as updates are made to the resources. The other is that we want them to be able to locate the resources when they need them outside of the course. 

We drive them to the resources by including exercises in the course that require some of them. When it's time for that exercise, we tell them where to go on our internal company portal to find the resources that will help them. 

Your project sounds like a very interesting one and I think it's great you are streamlining it. I look forward to seeing what else ends up in this discussion.

Hey John!

Sounds like a great step forward for the course....

Just one thing to add to all the (great) advice above - just make sure that the infra. is capable of supporting xx people accessing the online content when they are in the courses.

You and I both know of one major US-based client for whom the "online content in a classroom setting" experience went badly wrong when we tried it

You know where I am if you want to talk offline and have a brainstorm....!

Bruce