Virtual Learning: What’s the Real Scoop About Making It Both Virtual and Effective?
by Nancy Frevert
Clients are asking a lot of questions about virtual learning these days, and it’s not surprising. There are so many ways that virtual learning makes sense. Instead of bringing people to a common location for training, why not bring the training to them? Instead of paying a big travel bill and disrupting work schedules, why not integrate the learning right into the work environment? Why isn’t everybody doing it more often?
For many of our clients, the barrier isn’t a lack of interest, but a lack of confidence that the same quality of outcome can be achieved. It may be that you, or some of your internal customers, have had a poor experience with so-called virtual learning—possibly just a “talking head” presentation, illustrated with too many boring slides. Or you might have observed a tendency for people to tune out of web-delivered presentations, looking at e-mail or doing other things rather than being engaged and attentive. And of course the technology can still be daunting for some. Any of these common pitfalls can get in the way of real learning.
So, if you want to deliver great virtual learning experiences, what does it take?
First, let’s distinguish true virtual learning from other types of web-delivered presentations such as webinars, web meetings, or webcasts. A virtual learning session is an interactive experience for a small group, with the objective of learning new skills and behaviors. To ensure this objective is met, there are two critical factors necessary for the delivery of high-impact, truly effective virtual learning.
Those are:
- Excellent design, adapted specifically for the virtual classroom
- Expert facilitation, using techniques appropriate for unique virtual learning requirements
Let’s take design. You need to keep people from tuning out when they are sitting in an office in front of a computer. This is a much bigger problem than in a traditional classroom. Your design needs to build in a continuous flow of engaging, interactive activities that keep people on their toes, involved, and challenged. If they’re busy with relevant work, they won’t even think of dropping out to multi-task on something else. Include applications and practice in your design. One advantage of the virtual environment is that you can deliver learning in smaller chunks, allowing people to practice and apply their new skills on the job in between sessions.
What about facilitation? How is that different in a virtual environment? Keep in mind that you need a true facilitator, not a presenter. A successful facilitator of virtual learning sessions understands the nuances of keeping participants involved even though they are in dispersed locations and can’t visually connect with the session leader and their fellow learners.
Expert facilitators use all the technologies available in the contemporary virtual classroom—interactive white boards, breakout rooms, quick polls, and “hand raising”—to get people interacting with each other and with the facilitator throughout the session. This facilitator also has the experience to notice when someone is not engaged and is able to re-engage him or her. Keeping a fast pace and continuously changing types of activities also helps to keep participants from checking out.
What has your experience been with virtual classrooms? What questions or misperceptions have you heard about virtual learning? What tips would you share with someone beginning to explore virtual learning in his or her organization?
Comments (6) •
(0)
10:29 AM
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This is a great emerging topic in the learning and development industry. What I quickly noticed last year as we were focusing on how to do this well, was that it’s so easy to set up virtual “learning” sessions, that everyone is playing in this space. Unfortunately, we’ve seen more ineffective delivery than best practice. The knock-on effect seems to be that our customers (for us these are our employees) have become a little tentative to take full advantage of virtual learning opportunities for fear that they will be low quality and low value.
Curious to know if others are experiencing the same. We also continue to hear that our employees prefer the classroom experiences over live virtual events (even when they are high quality/high value).
-Marla Noble
3:36 PM
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What are the best “types” of learning via virtual learning? For example, would it best fit training people on new technical skills, new processes, best practices, onboarding, etc.?
-Michelle
10:35 AM
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Marla,
You are right, virtual learning is an emerging topic with a lot of interest. How people “do” virtual learning and the results they achieve have been all over the board. To engage participants, we need to help them understand what virtual learning is and demonstrate how it is done.
We have found that participants first need to understand the difference between a webcast, webinar and virtual learning (see May 10 blog on The Evolution of Virtual Learning). Then we need to help participants see the learning as valuable. The participant needs to experience how they are kept involved in the learning, how technology enables the learning, and how it applies to their world and their job. Our work shows that given the right content and learning design, it is possible for participants to see virtual learning equal to the traditional classroom delivery. It also allows for dispersed worker to have access to training they may not have had, being located away from the main office.
Virtual learning is a new and emerging capability that we are all continuing to learn about. I would enjoy hearing more from you.
Thank you for your comments,
Nancy
-Nancy Frevert
9:38 AM
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Michelle,
You ask a really good question. Over the years, we have seen many types of virtual learning – e-learning, online learning, blended learning – and I would have to say that historically, virtual learning worked best for learning technical skills, new procedures, etc. Interpersonal behavioral skills were harder to do using virtual learning technology. Today, technology has made the use of virtual learning for learning interpersonal behavioral skills more and more effective. We’ve had customers say that they feel the virtual learning is as effective as our face-to-face sessions.
Honestly, I am not sure if there is a best ‘type’ of learning for virtual learning. At Wilson Learning, we do believe that it is best to first determine your learning objective and learning constraints and then pick the right medium - what is the right medium for the right message. We also feel it is critical to reach the learner where they are and in a timely fashion. This may direct you to use virtual learning in such cases as on-boarding and training of groups that might not have access to training because they are located elsewhere.
Identifying your learning objectives, determining the right delivery medium and combining that with excellent design and expert facilitation – these are all key factors that play an important part of the effectiveness of the learning.
Regards,
Nancy
-Nancy Frevert
3:13 PM
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In your experience, what’s the maximum amount of time a participant can stay engaged in a virtual learning session? My sense is that even the most engaging activities and expert facilitation will fall victim to the phone and email after some period of time.
-Kyle
9:49 AM
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Hi Kyle,
Great question! I’m sure that many people have this same question and we do too!
We do believe there are other things that will help keep participants engaged beyond the activities. Relevance and real application are two things that we think help keep participants focused.
Relevance is critical:
If participants get the “what’s in it for me” and how it impacts them, you will keep them more engaged.
Real Application:
Beyond engaging activities, we also believe that having participants work on their own work and projects is essential to the learning. We design small group break-outs and have participants apply what they are learning to their work, their customers, etc. These activities have been very powerful for our participants.
To answer your question on “how long should a session be,” my response is, “it depends.” We try to design our sessions so they can be flexible to the customers organization and their need. For example, in some companies, employees get 100s of emails a day. That will impact how long you can keep them focused in a session. You need to take these types of things into consideration when delivering a virtual learning session. We try to develop sessions that are around 90 minutes to two hours - breaks can be incorporated into this - in some cases, companies want longer session so we have combined sessions to create 3-hour sessions with breaks.
Tell me what you are learning and what you have heard - we continue to learn and build on our experience with the experience of others as well.
-Nancy Frevert