How To Develop Effective Online Learning and Virtual Workshops

The Communication Process

COVID 19 has of course accelerated the speed with which many organisations have suddenly needed to provide their own people or their clients with online learning or virtual workshops if they are to continue the learning process. It can be tricky to achieve your learning outcomes, making sure that everyone has the best chance of learning what is needed and being able to apply that in the workplace. We will have a look at some of the main lessons that we have learnt through many years of delivering this type of learning. Hopefully it will make your experience easier and the learning for your people much more successful.

Remember How People Learn

The first step when thinking about your learning programme, is to remember how people learn, and particularly how adults learn.

Learning is an iterative process that is different for different people based on their learning styles and their own levels of motivation and learning goals.  We need to take people through the learning cycle several times and we should approach this as bite sized learning.

Understanding how people learn and what will also result in sustained change in the workplace should be at the core of our learning and development strategy, and therefore at the core of any online learning or virtual workshops.

Then we need to think about the style in which the learning is provided. If you work in a high risk, compliance industry, then you particularly need to be careful. Our experiences have led us to conclude that a high level of control over learning leads to a compliance culture where individuals do not engage in the learning. Instead they often try to work out ways of minimising effort as well as trying to overcome the controls in place. Not a place that you want to be in.  We therefore need to deliver a learning programme that achieves high engagement in order for it to be successful, whatever the type of learning material or the learning goals.

Think About The Learning Platform

For online learning, your learning platform needs to enable different learning approaches, including “closed” styles where the learner has little choice (“click and tick”) to more “open” styles where the learner has more control over their activities.

However, we do need to manage more open styles of online learning and there are different ways this can be managed within a digital platform.

We have found that the more open style works effectively for both technical and soft skills learning, and you can still build in measurement of progress.

Remember the Training Challenge

Whether learning is face to face in a classroom, online or in a virtual workshop, you still have the same training challenge that you need to consider in your learning solution.

How do you train your employees and then make sure they retain their knowledge?

There is no point investing in learning and development if the knowledge is not retained and you see no results back in the workplace.  Training solutions often fail as they are based on delivering information only, so a “told only” strategy.

This has to be the key thought that underpins any learning and development strategy especially when we consider the following about how people retain learning:

So when we consider online learning and virtual workshops, this rule still applies and we need to build this into how we approach the development of our learning strategy.

The Practicalities of Online Learning and Virtual Workshops

It is good to remember a few key points when developing online learning:

  • Bite size learning is important: learning in small chunks that is manageable to process, with the option to drill down further for more information as needed.
  • Take the learners through the learning cycle repeatedly: once is unlikely to be enough so present the information in different ways that will enable different learners to engage with the material and grasp the key messages in a way that suits them.
  • Keep it engaging but stay focused on the learning outcomes: the learning needs to be engaging for people to take an interest and want to learn but do not get too carried away with animations and forget what you are trying to achieve with the learning.
  • Remember people need time to read, absorb, reflect and apply and this needs to be built into the learning approach.
  • Blooms Taxonomy remains very useful: the model can be used in different ways, particularly the knowledge domain that can be used to plan how learner will develop through progressive levels of learning and what we need to do at the design stage to achieve such progress.

Keep Your Learning and Development Strategy at the Heart of it All

Online learning and virtual workshops should be treated no differently from any other type of learning experience. Your approach and solution should align to your learning and development strategy from:

  • Your vision for a successful outcome
  • Clarity on the needs of your audiences
  • An understanding of where you are now and where you need to be
  • Learning outcomes for each audience
  • Goals and objectives to achieve these learning outcomes
  • How you will take learners through the learning cycle?
  • How you will measure progress, achievement and your return on investment?

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