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.
Topics: Virtual Collaboration, Evaluation Strategy, Learner Engagement, Virtual Teams & Modern Workplace
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.
Topics: Virtual Classroom - Best Practices, Interaction, Virtual Collaboration
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.
Topics: Social Learning, 50 Modern Blended Learning Blogs, Virtual Collaboration
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.)
Topics: Virtual Classroom, 50 Modern Blended Learning Blogs, Virtual Collaboration
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.
Topics: Social Learning, pull learning, Virtual Collaboration
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.
Topics: Virtual Learners, Virtually There, Modern Learning, Virtual Collaboration, Virtual Teams & Modern Workplace
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.
Topics: Modern Learning, Virtual Collaboration, Modern Learning Culture Evolution Series
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.
Topics: Modern Learning, Virtual Collaboration, Modern Learning Culture Evolution Series
This is the fourth in a series of six posts exploring current issues facing training professionals and the upcoming trends in training for the next five years.
In this series we will examine what the current learning statistics show about the outlook for the modern workplace and the next five years, as well as four key trends associated with adapting training to the new context. As these trends play out, we need to consider how to implement a culture change in our training organizations and identify some of the challenges these changes will bring.
Trend 2 - Collaboration as a Competency
The problem with online collaboration in particular is that we introduce a lot of ambiguity. As learners, when nobody knows who's in charge of the learning experience, that role ambiguity can lead to learning inefficiencies. Instead of just tossing everyone into the virtual classroom and asking learners to "figure out this case study," best practices need to ensure that we allow everyone to participate in the learning experience but with a strong facilitator leading the way.
Topics: Trends, Virtual Collaboration, Training on the Edge Series
A key to enabling virtual learners is to design opportunities for learners to interact and collaborate. But how do you make virtual learning a collaborative experience?
The answer sounds simple: find ways to bring participants together for social interaction or to solve a problem. Unfortunately, building collaborative exercises remains a major stumbling block for instructional designers when creating virtual or blended programs. Let's look at some techniques you can use to ensure that your virtual programs, both self-directed and live online, hit the mark.
Topics: Design, Virtual Learners, Virtual Collaboration, Enabling Virtual Learners by Design Series
