Learning any development platform online is always a bit haphazard in my experience. The quality of the content, it being up to date, how to test or validate your learning. “Nothing is better than classroom training” and in some ways I agree… but maybe this is changing…
But first I’m going to evaluate trailhead using the Kirkpatrick model to make things more interesting and remind myself of the Kirkpatrick model, and see how it can be incorporated in assessing a students learning 🙂
For those who don’t know the Kirkpatrick model was created by Professor Donald Kirkpatrick back in 1959 to come up with a way to evaluate learning outcomes. It was subsequently updated in 1975 & 1994 and that was when he published his famous work “Evaluating Training Programs”. It consists of four levels but I’m going to evaluate based on the first level my “Reaction”.
Reaction:
This level measures the reaction of the trainees being trained. It could be a happy or smily face that they submit at the end of the training or something more detailed. Its important to find out from the trainees so you can continually improve the content and delivery of it.
My Trailhead Reaction:
Over all I think it is a really great way to learn.
Was it worth my time?
Totally, Even if you feel like you know Salesforce completely I’m sure you will find at least one tit-bit of information that you didn’t know previously.
What as the biggest Strengths & Weaknesses?
What I feel trailhead does brilliantly is its ability to verify you work that you have done. As part of the training you set up your own development org. This is essentially a full salesforce standard system just for you to play around in. Then as you work through the questions on trailhead you build everything in your org. Then when you get to the end of the question trailhead checks how you have built your answer in your org and tells you what you have got wrong or what you have got right.
Its like having an AI tutor sitting on your shoulder.
Automatic checking of your work is very impressive and this alone out weighs the weaknesses. So my weaknesses are minor and simple to fix, they revolve round the questions asked which I didn’t 100% agree with (but as of writing I haven’t completed all the modules). One particular question was around Sandboxes and how you would stop protected data appearing in the sandbox, there were two answers. One said delete the protected data after you create the sandbox the other was to use the sandbox templates to not include the objects that have personal data in them. The “correct” answer was to use the templates. But this would generally not be feasible in the real world, accounts & contacts generally hold the most protected data and they generally have so many dependancies to other objects you just can’t exclude them.
Did the training accommodate my learning style?
Different people have different styles. I’m a lot more a visual & audible learner than either a written word or Kinesthetic learner. Generally Trailhead does a really good job at including videos with the tutorials but I would like to see more.
Overall check it out, its a great way to Learn Salesforce and I’ve been using it as part of my study group and the participants have loved it and its really helped them prep for their Salesforce Admin Certification.
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