Looking for cost effective and agile ways to train staff?

Then virtual classroom (VC) may be the answer you are looking for (other terms for VC include webinar and web conferencing).

At first, virtual classroom can seem a little daunting to design and facilitate. A virtual classroom train-the-trainer workshop is a great way to build the skills and confidence you need to be successful. Visit Connect Thinking for more information.

Meanwhile, why not review these free resources from Connect Thinking and our affiliates.

Webinar design and facilitation techniques for learning, sharing and collaboration

These videos are an edited recording from a live webinar presentation sponsored by Redback Conferencing. Although the participant numbers were too large for a lot of participation, the recording will give you a sense of the role of web moderator (played by Sara) and facilitator (me).

10 Things that Make E-Learning Work

These videos help to understand the webinar process from ‘go to wo’. A collaboration with Colleen Kavanagh. This presentation also appeared in article format in HC Magazine, Sept 2011, pp34-36.

All E-Learning Academy videos are available on YouTube and iTunes.

If you have a virtual classroom question or experience you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post. Thank you.

Question from a client:

We have a new Learning Management System (LMS). How can it help us to induct new people into the organisation?

Okay. We need to think about what both the organisation and the new employee wants to achieve. A colleague of mine once said to me, in the first three weeks a new employee wants to:

1. satisfy themselves that their decision to join the organisation was the right one
2. prove to the organisation that their decision to engage the new employee was the right one

The organisation typically wants the new employee to become productive as soon as possible. And they want to mitigated risk by ensuring the new employee is conversant with important policies and guidelines.

E-Learning to mitigate risk

It’s important to think about learner ‘state’ (see points 1 & 2 above) when designing the key messages in compliance courseware. It’s important to couch the content and assessment appropriately, to reflect the people aspects of the culture. The LMS plays a role in tracking course completion from a reporting perspective.

E-Learning to enable productivity

Before we begin on this topic, it’s useful to think about ways of chunking induction-related training:

1. Induction from a) organisation, b) department, and c) role perspectives. A new employee should be inducted into policies, procedures, tasks and people from each of these three business perspectives (a, b, c). It’s useful to take a co-ordinated approach to designing Induction, so that all 3 perspectives are presented and trained in synergy.
2. Collison & Parcel’s two famous knowledge management questions to the stimulus question of “I have a need”
• a) What do others know about it? How do I find them? (think social networks) and
• b) What information is available? How do I find it? (think information management and performance support)

Effective social networks (live or online) help staff to satisfy their productivity needs. An effective social network is one that is responsive, well used, and has norms in place in relation to sharing and collaboration, so that people know what’s expected of them. The role of L&D is to show new employees how to engage in social networks to get what they need and to contribute.

Performance support tools are aids that have been specifically designed and mediated through technology for the purpose of supporting performance at the point-of-need. The role of L&D is to be an informal guide to help new employees learn to diagnose their needs and then use the performance support tools properly to satisfy the need.

At this time, most LMS play a weak role in enabling productivity. We need to look at more agile and heuristuc systems; systems that provide information and people at the point of need. Think mobile apps for in-the-field needs, group decision support systems, social intranets and other and social platforms such as Jive.

The bottom line

• Induction should be a holistic and co-ordinated effort of both centralised and decentralised parts of the business – organisation, department, role.
• We need to be mindful of how we portray the organisation in compliance e-learning courses – the focus should be on ensuring employees know how to behave to keep them safe and happy and what to do if they don’t feel safe/happy. The focus should not appear to be an exercise to satisfy the organisation’s legal requirements.
• To enable employees to be productive as soon as possible, we need to evaluate the social aspects of the business as well as the support tools available to staff. Active organisational ‘knowledge’ can only be found in the minds of the individual and the collective, so let’s use technology to better enable our employees to solve problems.
• The role of L&D stretches beyond instructional design to that of a learning architect – who can see and understand how systems, processes and people inter-relate and how these work together to drive efficient productivity, and even innovation.

Question from a client

Are there any examples of e-learning service level agreements (SLA) that you know of? I want to reduce expectation mismatch between ourselves and the e-learning provider.

Well, what a great idea. Wouldn’t it be great if e-learning providers issued formal service level agreements upon engagement, complete with escalation procedures and penalties.

I personally haven’t seen a specific, standalone SLA between an e-learning provider and client. I too have experienced expectation mismatch between e-learning providers and my client interests, despite having similar agreements in place, such as professional services agreements (PSA) issued by procurement, and very detailed request for quotation (RFQ) that form part of PSA agreements.

The RFQ is an opportunity to be clear about frequency of meetings & progress reports, definition of acceptable quality, timelines and project management methodology. However, less tangible deliverables such as level of creativity can be difficult to quantify in a RFQ or SLA.

A SLA also sets up an expectation of client responsibilities around project management, timelines etc. Clients need to ensure they have adequate resources to deliver their SLA responsibilities. For example, if a client takes 5 days instead of 3 days for a deliverable, then the e-learning provider may have a position to take the client to task.

[I have recently seen RFQ responses with small print outlining penalties to clients if timelines are not met on the client side. This is to help manage e-learning provider resource allocation. This kind of small print may be frowned upon by the client during assessment of the RFQ.]

Most projects have unforeseen issues, and sometimes it’s as much about managing stakeholder expectations as anything else. It’s important to be clear and realistic at each step of the project, and build a good working relationship with the e-learning provider, with some give and take. Frequent communication is key.

Speak with your procurement office or IT department for further advice on SLAs, or talk with your e-learning provider to see if a SLA can be put into place.

If you’ve seen or used a SLA, I’d love to read about it. Please leave a comment.

Question from a client:

What’s an effective and efficient way to develop training of a new system that won’t break the bank?

If this was a question for broad use systems training, such as Microsoft Office 2010, then the answer may have been to:

• use the performance support tools that the systems provider offers (Microsoft support has improved)
• purchase an off-the-shelf e-learning package (e.g. from Skillsoft or InterAction)
• look at Lynda.com as a viable option for performance support in video format

In this case it is not a broadly used system, and the vendor does not provide e-learning for it’s product because it is largely customised. So, what are the options? If possible, consider creating e-learning solutions for three kinds of learning outcomes and learner states:

1. Present the concept and key messages

The first thing employees need to know is “why the change?” Be sure to sell the benefits of the new system truthfully  – what it will do for employees, customers and the organisation. Address the “why” both in the e-learn, and with comprehensive corporate communication.

Create an e-learning course that introduces employees to the system as a whole. Introduce the concept of the system and how it fits with current processes – what changes, and what stays the same. Use real case studies to contextualise the new system in daily activites. You may wish to track this course on teh LMS to ensure everyone is across the change.

2. Provide bite-size topics in reusable form, at the point of need

This is about creating training solutions to address the ”how” – the ”how do I” user questions. Use a screen capturing tool (e.g. Camtasia) and export to video format. Be sure to script the topics for video first, to gain agreement on what’s important and what’s not. Publish the videos in places that are searchable and make sense to the end users, such as inside the system’s help function, on the intranet, or on in-field laptops via a synchronised mechanism. Make sure the videos are short (2-4 minutes) and address discrete topics.

A FAQ online user forum is another cost effective way to manage questions associated with specific topics. Allow everyone to contribute to user questions – this is called user generated content.

3. Provide a mechanism for ongoing support

This is about demonstrating that you will provide personalised support – that there are no excuses not to become a proficient user of the system. Scheduled webinars are a good way to provide ongoing support. For example, during systems roll-out you can offer training on specific topics or ad-hoc support via webinar between 3-4pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Of course, providing employees with ways to access system “Superusers” is another great way to tap into the social network of organisations to get upskilling across.

The Bottom Line

• Effective change management is about a) communication,  b) education and c) modelling behaviour. The three approaches outlined above ticks each of these boxes.
• Effective training requires both context and detail. Be sure to engage hearts and minds, and the practicalities of using the system.
• Don’t put “how do I” content in Learning Management Systems (LMS). LMS are too far away from workflow, and this kind of content does not need to be tracked.
• Look for creative ways to assess that your training approach has worked, such as a drop in Helpdesk enquiries, a drop in users accessing FAQs, and a audit of content being entered into the system.
• Don’t train the system in isolation. Ensure real case studies and processes are used to create context around the system.