Bad training exists across all modalities. Here's an example activity from an eLearning information security course that I recently came across.
What's so terrible about it? Let me count the ways...
The activity has NOTHING to do with the context in which people must work. Who does a word search in their job?
The activity also has nothing to do with learning a new behavior unless if you count searching for words as a new behavior.
The activity asks you to guess the answers, rather than to synthesize ideas and apply.
The design is terrible – you click on the first and last letters to make a selection of a word, and it doesn’t even work. There is no feedback on selections and you don’t know what answers you have given and are still to complete.
The timer gives a false sense of urgency – indeed, what is urgent about a word search? Plus it resets each time you exceed. Why set a timer to begin with?
And these are the reasons that I think this is terrible just off the top of my head. What Instructional Designer thought this was a good idea? Design like this just makes all of our jobs that much more difficult.