Have you heard? Our workplaces face radical, exciting, and innovative change with the emergence of powerful and game-changing technologies. But as Jennifer Hofmann recently highlighted, the purchase of new tools does not sufficiently prepare our organizations to integrate them in day-to-day work.

Adoption requires effort – a purposeful plan, a visionary team, and a strategic goal. Most importantly, stakeholders must consider the employees impacted by the technology change. How will their professional lives change? How arduous will the transition to the new technology be?

This post is part of an occasional series “Advice from the Virtual Trenches” where we share real lessons learned when virtual and blended learning didn’t go as planned.

Virtual classrooms have been available to training organizations for over 20 years. As someone who has specialized in this domain during that entire time, I tend to forget that not every organization has adopted virtual training as an acceptable alternative to more traditional approaches.

I was definitely reminded of this recently when we worked with a global organization to implement their first substantive virtual training project.

Learning does not just happen. The success or failure of knowledge transfer and behavior change depends on many factors such as engaging facilitation, thoughtful instructional design, and purposeful training deployment and management. And, many would argue, that underlying all of those elements lies a bedrock of neuroscience.

Learning theories, which attempt to define how students gain, process, and retain information, have a storied and stormy history within the Learning and Development field. Some experts swear by their efficacy and rely on them heavily, while others dispel them as pseudoscience bunk.

This month we’ve focused on the relationship between engagement and motivation. Chip Dye discussed how engagement is what keeps people in class, and I responded with a post that proposed learner motivation gets learners to class in the first place. 

This month I’ve read articles, listened to podcasts, and filled up my Kindle. What really stood out is that I learned so much from other fields about how to motivate modern learners. I found this self-guided learning process engaging 😊. 

Virtually There Session Recap

Many factors influence your professional success – hard work, opportunity, your network, and quite frankly, a bit of luck.

But what if there is an unseen factor that shapes your future and progress? Diversity training expert Christine Miles knows from experience this is true. During her engaging Virtually There event, Christine astutely advised that bias plays a significant part in our advancement.

If we can’t see bias – our own and that of others – how do we combat it or use it to our advantage? Christine shared her proven process for going beyond diversity and towards awareness for better business results (watch the entire Virtually There replay here).

Adoption of virtual classrooms for training delivery has become a critical component of an organization’s learning strategy. Unfortunately, we’ve been delivering one-way webinars for so long, it is difficult for facilitators to make the transition to a more collaborative instructional approach. 

New facilitators need to start with the basics, including being able to:

• Use collaboration tools to support communication between everyone in the virtual classroom;
• Work effectively with a producer to effectively manage the experience; and
• Be able to effectively manage any technical or instructional problems that arise.

Let us count the ways!

Valentine’s Day encourages us to fill our hearts with love and our bellies with chocolates. Not a team to ignore tradition, InSync, hit by cupid’s arrow, considered all the reasons we adore the modern blended classroom.

Whether a learner or learning industry leader, a facilitator or designer, manager or new practitioner, we can all find something that gives us training butterflies.

Designing and delivering an engaging learning experience is an effective way of keeping people in the virtual learning experience once they've started, but getting people to enroll and attend in the first place is a matter of motivation.

Motivation is an entirely different animal than engagement, and as learning professionals, it's our responsibility to "set the stage" such that learners show up ready to engage. 

You just became a virtual learning facilitator or your organization has made the leap from face-to-face learning to the blended virtual classroom.

So now what?

The live online training environment does not provide a carbon copy instructional experience to the traditional classroom. Oftentimes, you cannot “see” the learners. You have to contend with technology, and sometimes decision makers did not invest in content redesign. Add to these factors the angst associated with assuming new responsibilities and getting started as a facilitator can feel overwhelming.

Very often you will read or hear about “learner-centric” learning methods.  These articles stress techniques that accommodate the learner’s needs and address expectations of the learner in the learning experience.  One commentator I heard recently likened this to “putting yourself in the shoes of the learner in the learning experience.”

Fair enough as a start – certainly we need to understand how the learning experience is perceived by the learner, but I would argue that in lieu of trying to put yourself in the shoes of the learner you should instead provide a learning experience where everyone’s shoes already fit.