Getting the most out of CubeTree: Corporate Training

Reduce the administrative overhead of courses by 15%

You can use CubeTree to do a lot of different things because it's easy to use and very powerful. Sometimes, it's useful to hear about how others are using it to serve their specific needs. So that's what I'm going to do today by focusing on corporate training. We have several customers who have been talking to us recently about how they use CubeTree to support internal training courses. One customer that I spoke to last week told me that by using CubeTree to facilitate their training class, they were able to regain 15% of their total time teaching by reducing the amount of administrative overhead distributing documents and assignments and answering Q&A in email.

A class is like a social network whose main focus is to communicate and process information. In that respect, it's an excellent place to use CubeTree. You've got groups of people who need to get information from multiple sources inside and outside the classroom: from the instructor, from other students, from online resources, from collaborations on assignments and more. Over the course of the session students also have questions and need answers to complete their work. It isn't uncommon to cover far more material than they have time to discuss during the session and success often depends on self learning by the students outside of class.

When the instructor started using CubeTree to support his training sessions, he essentially replaced his dependance on email, spreadsheets and the corporate file share. For him, the class he was teaching required over 40 documents that were used during the eight week course. He needed a place to store and distribute these documents. He also needed a place where students could collaborate and ask questions outside of class.

Each session used a private internal group in CubeTree where the instructor uploaded documents and used a wiki to organize links to content. The class loved the wiki because it was easy to access and edit for adding additional content that they found useful. Although there were many documents and links, the instructor could see that there were about 5-10 that were used by students on a constant basis. He could have used email to distribute the links, but managing all that in email would have been cubersome and difficult to ensure a single location where all students could view and add content. The benefit of CubeTree for the class was that all those links were always in the same spot and easy to access. In addition, every time someone updated the wiki page by adding another link or comment, everyone in the group was notified.

The class also used the blog feature for homework. The instructor created blog posts that captured the session's themes and students added scenarios and experiences that demonstrated their understanding and ability to incorporate their learning. The instructor also noted that students were able to complete exercises faster than during previous sessions where they primarily used email. He also indicated that he felt people worked together more and had greater team cohesion.

During the class, the instructor also used the CubeTree polls feature as a feedback channel to improve the way he delivered content. Questions like "Is this class going to fast?" were used and the instructor was able to adjust based on the real-time feedback.

The most rewarding thing for the instructor was the continued use of CubeTree by the students after the course was over. The instructor saw students were still using the group to ask questions and share best practices concerning situations back on the job.

When asked about using CubeTree this customer said "CubeTree saved me 15% of my time teaching in the class" by reducing the amount of time needed to spend on 'administration' work for the session. Replacing the databases, spreadsheets, file repositories and email that were previously used as communication vehicles, CubeTree provided a new social way to communicate during the session and extended the collaboration well into the future.