Challenges to overcome
So, if learning has changed, have you changed with it? And, if you have, will the changes you have made enable you to thrive rather than just survive as you move towards a post-pandemic digital world?
The onset of the pandemic saw organisations quickly shift to online and convert a large percentage of classroom into digital formats to bolster capabilities and meet learners’ immediate needs.
These conversion activities were essential for meeting learners’ immediate needs at the onset of the pandemic, but, in the longer term, may struggle to deliver in terms of effort, quality and scale. Here’s why:
Conversion is not transformation
Good learning design requires instructional know-how and learner engagement demands a certain level of design quality for the best results. Simply converting a bad training session into an online delivery format doesn’t provide any better learning impact. In fact, not understanding the nuances of digital learning design can mean taking a bad session and making it instructionally worse in the online medium.
Learning is much more than a webinar
Maybe, like many, you hadn’t planned or delivered a webinar before 2020. Webinars are great and they are here to stay as part of a learning blend. However, as I wrote in a recent Institute of Directors article, modern learning technologies have so much more to offer in terms of impact and innovation than what can be achieved through repeat webinar sessions.
You need to scale effectively
Learners like the flexibility of online but training teams need to find ways to scale their efforts. You cannot continue in emergency mode. Running webinars takes time and effort; repeat sessions quickly lose their lustre for learners and trainers alike. (Yes - Zoom fatigue is real). Designing interactive eLearning courses can have real impact, but the threshold is quite high in terms of time, resourcing, and budget to create something effective, making it better suited to whole audience training needs or flagship projects.
Content overload
One of the biggest challenges that many organisations need to overcome is the sheer volume of content available to them, with many now taking stock of what is available and what can be used for immediate and future needs. Whilst this volume of content may have been relevant in a traditional sense, many now have the challenge to ensure that existing and imminent training is designed to meet and deliver learning objectives and the desired organisational outcomes. The solution lies in not what needs to be added to learning programmes and courses, but what needs to be taken out.
What do you need to do about this change?
It is essential to look at different types of learning that can be brought together into an effective blend, where our classroom and webinars form part of a scaled pathway of learning alongside self-directed learning, curated learning and other forms of activities, assessments, and tasks.