Our steering committee is having a discussion about whether we should offer training for a small fee, or whether training should be free. We currently have presentations at each meeting which are free. The issue we have is that members are not mastering these presentations enough to do it on their own after the presentation is over. So we're thinking about having smaller, more focused, hands-on training sessions outside of the main monthly meeting. The challenge is how can we get the experts to volunteer significant time to develop and deliver a training module--or even come to a meeting and help the newbies. Everyone has significant demands on their time and arguably there is little incentive for an expert to spend time on something they already know. Given the traffic congestion in our city and the wide range of options one has for their time, each of our meetings must have a fairly relevant value proposition to get someone to attend. This translates into, the more proficient members are quite selective about the meetings they will attend. When they do attend meetings, or when I specifically ask them to conduct a workshop, they are willing to help the novices. But I would say 90% of our regular meeting attendees are people who want to learn more about Drupal--not people who can theme, and write custom modules.
So to rephrase the question:
Would we get a higher quality training session by modestly compensating the trainer?
Or does paying the members to train one another pervert the whole concept of a user group?