It’s 7:30 AM on a Monday morning. I’m logged in to a Zoom call with 22 strangers. A scattering of novelists. A few bloggers. Two high school students working on homework. Some folks recording podcasts. And at least one person working on their taxes.

Training and development are extremely important components of employee satisfaction and engagement. Appropriate training and development opportunities also play a factor in your staff's ability to be productive throughout the day. In fact, a recent study found that 87 percent of Millennial-aged employees list opportunity for training and career advancement as extremely important in their job search.

Clearly, training plays a huge role in your company's success, but training sessions can quickly turn into a disaster if not implemented in a structured and professional manner. A training company can offer valuable structure to your training process and are highly skilled in engaging the audience in a way that is conducive to learning. Even if you don't seek the help of a professional company, here are some tips for conducting a productive training session with your employees.

Virtual classroom platforms now include a plethora of tools meant to encourage learner participation. We have whiteboards, breakout rooms, polls, text-based chat. Including them appropriately in our programs positively impacts our modern learners’ experiences. 

One modern learning challenge we face though, is the type of engagement these tools generate: is it interaction or collaboration?

Today we sort through the confusion and define collaboration and interaction, and clarify their relationship with virtual learning events.

I learn best when I learn with others. When I have someone there (physically or virtually) with me sharing the experience, I know it makes a difference. I want (I would go as far as saying “need”) to have conversations threaded into my learning to make it stick. 

Yes, I am a very social person, and I thrive on conversation and collaboration. I also understand that not everyone is like me, and social learning is not meant for every learner in every situation. So, when does social collaboration make sense?

Let’s go back to those 5 moments of learner need, and explore where social collaborative learning would benefit our learners during each individual moment.

Virtual classroom lessons should be more about learners working together collaboratively than lecture and PowerPoint. Intellectually, we all recognize that. But, what purpose does collaboration truly serve and what virtual classroom tools achieve the desired result?

Why do you suppose we bring people together to learn?

Is it merely to allow a Facilitator the opportunity to lecture to a multitude of people simultaneously? Or is it perhaps to provide opportunities for deeper learning through collaboration? (Two or more people practicing new skills and applying new knowledge.)

BYTE Session Recap

As a follow-up to her informative session Engaging Modern Learners: When to Push and When to Pull, Jennifer Hofmann recently shared Pulling Learners to Your Content: How to Make it Work with our BYTE session attendees. Over the course of this engaging live online event, Jennifer and participants brainstormed on how to leverage social collaborative Pull Learning during the various moments of learning need. This blog will share the highlights from their collaborative efforts.

To learn more about microlearning, and a more detailed review of social collaborative tools, access Jennifer’s full BYTE session recording here.

As the workplace continues to evolve, and training approaches evolve to support it, at some point it will be hard to distinguish the difference between working and learning. And that’s a good thing.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the modern classroom environment lately. And there is no doubt that modern learners have more options about where and how they learn. We also know that today’s workplace demands training be embedded in the workflow, with minimal disruption to the daily routine.

Today's workforce is more global, virtual, and mobile than ever before. Learning professionals must adapt to this new culture in order to best support modern learners. Based on Jennifer Hofmann's recent BYTE presentation, The Modern Learning Culture - What Makes it Tick?, this microblog series will present ten ways that learning professionals can evolve in order to successfully navigate emerging learning culture.

This is the second post in the series. Click here to start with the first post.

For additional information and support, download the InSync Training infographic, What is Driving the Modern Learning Culture, and watch the recording of the BYTE presentation, The Modern Learning Culture - What Makes it Tick?

Second Way to Evolve with the Modern Learning Culture: Personalize Collaboration

The second way learning professionals can evolve to meet the needs of participants in the modern learning culture is to make a concerted effort to personalize collaboration.

Today's workforce is more global, virtual, and mobile than ever before. Learning professionals must adapt to this new culture in order to best support modern learners. Based on Jennifer Hofmann's recent BYTE presentation, The Modern Learning Culture - What Makes it Tick?, this microblog series will present ten ways that learning professionals can evolve in order to successfully navigate emerging learning culture.

For additional information and support, download the InSync Training infographic, What is Driving the Modern Learning Culture, and watch the recording of the BYTE presentation, The Modern Learning Culture - What Makes it Tick?

First Way to Evolve with the Modern Learning Culture: Establish Collaboration as a Competency

Learning professionals need to establish collaboration as a competency in order to evolve with the modern learning culture. Doing so will ultimately support the way our learners work. We can all agree that we want to include collaboration in the modern classroom. We want learners to work and learn together. Furthermore, thanks to the functional media tools available to us, we seem to have a toolset that can allow collaboration to take place.