Forum Discussion
How Are You Managing Large Facilitator Guides? Looking for Alternatives to Word Documents
Hi everyone,
I'm looking for ideas and examples of how others manage facilitator guides for established training programs.
Current setup:
- We have a fully developed training program for new hires.
- Training includes a blend of e-learning, videos, activities, discussions, and instructor-led sessions.
- Our facilitator guides have grown significantly over time as we've added updates, notes, discussion prompts, facilitator instructions, links, and resources.
We're currently using Word documents, but they're becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to their size and complexity. We're running into issues with navigation, version control, updates, and overall usability for facilitators.
I'm curious:
- What format or platform do you use for facilitator guides?
- Have you moved away from Word documents? If so, to what?
- Do you use SharePoint pages, Articulate Rise, knowledge bases, wikis, Notion, Confluence, LMS resources, or something else?
- How do you organize content so facilitators can quickly find what they need during delivery?
- Any lessons learned from transitioning from a traditional facilitator guide to a more dynamic solution?
I'd love to hear what has worked (or not worked) for your team. Thanks in advance!
1 Reply
In a prior role that used Word documents for both facilitator guides as well as learner guides (which were facilitator guides trimmed of notes and answers to questions), they were all linked in SharePoint "learning program" pages, a list of tables, one for each day of the program, that contained links to the documents. The enterprise eventually transitioned from SharePoint to an intranet that simplified the creation and editing of those web pages. Regardless of the platform, the backbone though was a web page that linked out to all of the content people needed.
That a curriculum is a web page means the hyperlink stays the same even if you all update it, adding or deleting content. And since it contains links to documents hosted elsewhere, if you change a document, no one will ever know since the link for them looks the same as it always did.
If your Word documents keep having information added to them, then it sounds like they're due for a split. Information should be compartmentalized and chunked out for easier consumption. If we're managing a curriculum for automotive repair and I have a facilitator guide that goes over emissions and electrical and body work and tires, there might be an opportunity to split those out into their own facilitator guides. The web page mentioned before can have a table for day 4, and then one row contains a link to the facilitator guide for emissions, and the next row contains a facilitator guide for electrical, and so on. If learners need to watch a video on youtube, that can be a link in a third row, and if they need to go and take an eLearning on an LMS, that can be a link in a fourth row. Everything's segmented so it can be consumed piecemeal.
Depending on complexity, separate pages can exist for different weeks, and a table-of-contents page can link to all of the weeks. How I've seen it is that a facilitator curriculum page will typically have a column with links to the facilitator guides and a column with links to the learner guides, and then when it came time to republish an updated learner curriculum page, we'd duplicate the updated facilitator one and just delete the handful of facilitator guide columns. We'd only really edit the facilitator one as a master, and then just duplicate and trim it to create the learner one.
Hopefully that helps. Happy to discuss. Word itself isn't bad or good. An inverse version of your problem would be someone creating 97 one-page Word documents and expecting facilitators to sort through those. Just as untenable but in a different way. Sounds like y'all's information architecture may just need a reset.
