In a post last week, I asked a series of questions to get a better idea of the effort that you’ve needed to apply as you bring training programs to a completely virtual/online environment. If you didn’t have a chance to respond, I invite you to check out the survey questions and add your own responses here.
I promised to share results, and after a week’s worth of data collection, there are some interesting findings, including the fact that one virtual meeting platform is being used FAR MORE than any other, and there is definitely more in-person training that is still happening than I would have hypothesized. Here is the way the survey results have come in to date:
Conference season is coming! What do conferences look like during the time of Covid-19? One of our favorite conferences, Learnapalooza, is taking things virtual this year and we sat down with Chief Innovator Erin Peterschick to hear what she and her team are planning.
This conference is typically set in the Seattle area and offers an affordable and engaging conference experience. Facing the disruption of Covid-19, Erin and her team have moved quickly to create a virtual experience accessible by anyone while still keeping the cost reasonable. To learn more about the speakers, panels, and engaging activities at Learnapalooza, please visit LapJam 2020 or keep up with real-time updates on their Twitter feed.
In this COVID era, I bet a lot of you might be looking for an answer to this question. The truth is, we are, too.
So, in an effort to get to the bottom of this, we decided to allocate today’s Train Like A Champion post to a series of multiple choice poll questions to learn more about the burden you’re shouldering when moving from in-person to virtual training programs. If you have five minutes or so, we’d love your thoughts on the following questions.
In return, we’ll share the results in an upcoming post!
Are there some questions I haven’t asked through these poll questions that could offer additional insights into the burden you’ve faced going from in-person to virtual? I’d love to hear about it in the comment section.
Recessions and economic downturns happen. Many of us have worked – or tried to work – through more than one economic downturn. As training departments tend to be small compared to other departments, how do we stay relevant in tough economic times?
Chris Pirie from the Learning Futures Group sits down with the Train Like You Listen team this week to give us a little history of his experiences in training department during economic downturns. He takes some time to discuss how this economy is different than others in his experience, and what the business case is for learning and development, no matter what the economy.
If you are interested in hearing more from Chris, be sure to check out his work and his podcast at learningisthenewworking.org
Tune in this week, and every week to learn more about what other professionals are doing to push our industry forward!
Virtual training delivery has always been tricky, but since COVID-19 basically eliminated business travel, just about everyone has made a push to convert existing training programs to virtual.
Sometimes converting programs to virtual can be fairly simple, but usually the best results come from keeping your learning objectives the same, but starting from scratch when it comes to activities. Virtual programs and in-person programs are simply two different experiences, and retrofitting in-person programs to fit into virtual delivery may have been appropriate when we were desperately looking for quick ways to continue offering professional development, it’s certainly not the best long-term solution.
Within the next week or two, Soapbox will be updated to allow users to choose whether they’d like to create an in-person or a virtual training program. Here’s a closer look at how you’ll be able to generate an entire training lesson plan, with activity instructions customized to your virtual delivery platform, in about 10 minutes.
Step 1: Enter some basic information (Approximately 2 minute)
Simply begin by entering the name of your presentation, the amount of time you have to deliver your presentation, whether your presentation is to be delivered in-person or online (this blog post focuses on online delivery), the approximate number of people who will attend, the type of presentation and your virtual platform.
The amount of time you have to deliver your presentation, the approximate number of people who will attend and the platform will all impact the actual activities that are generated for your presentation. You’ll be given different activities and instructions if you have 4 people attending than if you have 400 people attending. Similarly, you’ll be able to use different features of a virtual platform to engage your audience if you’re using a platform like Zoom that has breakout room capabilities compared to if you’re using a platform like Microsoft Teams which does not allow for breakout room discussions.
Step 2: Decide what your learners should be able to do by the end of your session (Approximately 8 minutes)
There are about 30 different choices for your learning outcomes. The key question here is: given the amount of time of your presentation and the goals of your program, what is it that your learners will realistically be able to do by the end of your presentation?
Some people contend that they can cover 6-10 objectives during a 30 minute presentation. While those people may have 6-10 talking points they’d like to cover, those aren’t learner-focused objectives.
Soapbox will limit the number of learning outcomes you’ll be able to select based upon the amount of time you have available for your presentation. This will ensure a presentation that stays focused and offers participants an opportunity to find ways to practice using your content.
Once you’ve made it through steps 1 and 2, you’ll have a presentation with activity instructions that connect to your learning outcomes and that is customized for your delivery platform. Most users have suggested it takes less than 10 minutes to get to this point.
Step 3: Customize and refine the virtual training activities
There’s no need for you or your team to spend time thinking through the best combination of activities that align with your learning objectives and that will keep your learners engaged. In this final step, you can now invest your time in making sure you have the right activities and talking points for your presentation.
You can drag and drop activities to re-arrange the sequence and flow of the presentation that’s been generated.
You can swap out a suggested activity for one that may better suit your facilitation style, your comfort level with the virtual platform and your learners’ needs.
You can edit the activity instructions and add talking points that are important to cover during your session.
Step 4: Generate slides and a facilitator guide
Some Soapbox users find the PowerPoint file generated to be a time saver, and they modify the slide deck with some specific talking points, diagrams, illustrations or other key visuals. Others find that they will use their own slide templates, but copy some of the content from the Soapbox-generated slides. Either way, you have a visual resource that can be downloaded and used as you see fit.
Many Soapbox users like to have a hard copy instruction guide at their fingertips, so they’ll download the Facilitator Guide that can be generated. This guide offers step by step activity instructions and reflects any edits and talking points you may have made to each activity.
That’s it. Soapbox’s virtual capabilities will be released by August 15 (perhaps sooner!). If you think Soapbox could be helpful to you, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial here.
You can also sign up for a brief demo to have someone walk you through Soapbox by selecting a spot on the calendar below.
Training isn’t created in a vacuum. Many learning professionals spend hours reading about and looking for inspiration and the latest trends in design and development. There are a few key people in our industry who are interested in helping all of us move forward and push the limits of engaging and creative training. Award-winning eLearning developer Ashley Chiasson is one of those people.
On Train Like You Listen this week, we sit down with Ashley to talk about how she found success in her role. Ashley shares the story of how she got started, like many of us, in a circuitous way, how she approaches stake-holders with differing visions, and she takes some time to shares some great resources!
Here in the United States, our Spring of COVID-19 has turned into the Summer of COVID-19, and soon, we’ll have the Autumn of COVID-19. It doesn’t appear that we’ll be coming together to deliver in-person training or in-person conference sessions any time soon. So how can organizations best help their presenters convert their programs from in-person to virtual delivery?
Retrofitting your existing programs to try to do the same thing, just in a virtual environment is tempting. Keep in mind, however, that virtual delivery offers opportunities for which in-person instruction doesn’t allow… and there are some things you can do in-person that you just can’t do online. Below, you’ll find a lesson plan that we’ve created for a 90-minute session that you can use to help educate your staff, co-workers or clients on ways to think through the conversion from in-person to online instruction.
Nobody knows what the world will look like in a few weeks, months, or years. One thing is for sure, there is a drastic increase in virtual tools to facilitate meetings, and we need to be successful working with them. This time has shown many of us that virtual meetings may well be a way of working for many more of us than we ever anticipated. Now that we have the tools to do it, we somewhat expect our colleagues and coworkers to intuitively know how to create engaging experiences with these tools. Has that been your experience?
This week on the podcast, we talk to Lauren Wescott and Tim Waxenfelter about how they are leading a team to release an advanced version of Soapbox to create engaging virtual training in just a few minutes. The Endurance Learning team talks about how we moved from a tool that prioritized the instructor-led experience to a virtual experience, some lessons we learned, and what to expect from Soapbox in the near future.
Tune in this week, and every week to learn more about what other professionals are doing to push our industry forward!
Are you tired of being 100% virtual yet? A lot of people are. And that’s ok.
Unfortunately, it also makes our jobs in the world of instructional design and training a bit more difficult. Virtual Meeting Fatigue and Virtual Training Fatigue are real. So what’s an instructional designer to do?
Stop operating in “Emergency Mode”
We’ve been 100% virtual since St. Patrick’s Day, so organizations need to stop thinking that using the tools we’ve always used to cobble something together in perpetuity is ok. It’s not ok. If you’re still trying to use Skype or Microsoft Teams or even GoToMeeting to actually train people because it’s the platform your company has used to connect virtually for the past five years, then continuing to upskill your people is clearly not a priority.
Sound adult learning practices are the first way to help your learners feel less like they’ve been shoved into training purgatory, sitting through sessions with little interaction. Virtual delivery actually presents a number of opportunities you may not even find in the classroom with breakout rooms and polling that are easy to set up.
Companies are saving a ton of money on travel these days. If you’re still feeling restricted in terms of the features of your current platform, asking to divert funds that have already been budgeted for (but will not be spent on) travel could be a way to finally upgrade to Zoom or GoToTraining or WebEx or Adobe Connect.
Keep your instructional design basics tight
As I alluded to in the first point, taking full advantage of online features such as polling, breakout rooms, on-screen annotation, chat and document sharing is key to good engagement.
If you need your staff to demonstrate that they know how to correctly input information into an online system, then don’t just talk at them and share your own screen, have them share their screens and talk you through what they understand about the system. If you need people to list the steps in a process, have them type in the correct steps in the chat.
This article can help you determine what features are available on your platform and how to connect your learning objectives with online activities.
Send physical training materials
A client we’ve helped transition from in-person delivery to virtual delivery is sending training materials to their participants. When I talk about training materials, I’m not just talking about a Participant Guide with job aids and handouts for them to physically use as they’re following along in virtual sessions. I’m also talking about green and pink note cards that they need to hold up to their webcam during an activity.
Yes, you could use the voting feature for this activity, but physically having participants hold up note cards to their webcam allows facilitators to see who is answering in which way, and doesn’t allow participants to wait and see how others are answering.
Taking advantage of the webcam and sending materials beyond just the Participant Guide can be a way for your participants to physically feel a part of the training program (as opposed to having to download and maybe print their own files).
As long as sending stuff is on the table…
Why not make it a true virtual happy hour and send margarita mix to your group? Is it a virtual coffee, send a Starbucks gift card (or perhaps even send some Dunkin Donuts coffee beans to each person).
Want to collect information about the session? Ask participants to write down their biggest take-away and return it in a postage-paid envelope.
The Learning and Development community is not always easy to break into. Even in an office setting with a relatively large training team, finding one’s connection into the community can be a herculean purist.
In this week’s podcast, we talk to someone who works hard to solve this problem. Bianca Woods of the Learning Guild discusses how to leverage free tools like Twitter to connect with like-minded, or maybe like-questioned – groups of people who have regular discussions about topics in our industry.
Tune in this week, and every week to learn more about what other professionals are doing to push our industry forward!
