Imagine how it would be to learn something and skip the testing. Well, some of us would be happy—who wants to give the test? Not me! Testing as a concept seems to have a stress angle attached to it, and consequently, it does add some pressure. Typically, our view of tests is:

• If we pass—great news!
• If we don’t pass—there is trouble.

Let’s recollect those days from our memory when we used to prepare for tests in school as if it was a battle and felt like partying when it was all done. Until recently, I thought:

• Testing comes at the end of learning.
• Testing declares the results: whether we passed or failed.
• It is a method to measure/evaluate how much we know.
• It completes the learning cycle.

A lot changed when I was introduced to the concept of testing as described in the book Make it Stick by Peter C. Brown et al. It helped me to understand that testing can have multiple learning benefits, and if done right, it can be an enormously powerful tool for learning and not just used for measurement. It might sound surprising to some of us (as it certainly did to me) but there is a lot of research in cognitive science and psychology that shows that if testing is conducted in the right way it can be an exceptionally effective way to learn. By the right way, I mean keeping these parameters in mind while designing a test.

However, the question still remains: how does testing improve learning? Here are some key points from Make it Stick that help to answer this question:

• Testing is a calibration tool
  It helps calibrate our judgments of what we’ve learned. In virtually all areas of learning, you build better proficiency when you use testing as a tool to identify your areas of weakness.
• Testing is a learning tool
  It has the potential to eliminate the “familiarity trap” or, in other words, it can help you get out of your comfort zone. Imagine you’ve learned something and feel that you know everything and do not need to practice it. It is only when you take a test that you realize that your performance was below your expectations and you need to revisit the topic to master it, thus avoiding or breaking free of the familiarity trap.
• Testing helps transfer our knowledge to other contexts
  Testing, compared to rereading, can facilitate better transfer of knowledge to new contexts and problems, and it improves one’s ability to retain and retrieve material that is related but not assessed.
• Testing improves recall over longer intervals
  Recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall it again in the future. In effect, retrieval testing interrupts forgetting. This is called the “testing effect.”

I am sure this has made you think about the various possibilities of utilizing better ways of testing to improve overall learning. Let me know what you think.

Note:- This article was published in the eLearning Industry site.

The post The Power Of Testing: Testing As A Tool For Learning first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Amit Garg – Founder & CEO said, “It is an honor to be recognized as a great place to work again for our culture that values innovation, team-work, and a spirit to Go Beyond each and every time to deliver a great experience for our customers. Of all the awards and accolades we have won, for me personally being certified as a Great Place To Work for the second time great feeling.”

As part of this assessment, Upside Learning employees took an anonymous survey which assessed people related management practices using Great Place to Work® People Practice Culture Audit^© Framework and measured the perceptions of the employees using Great Place to Work® Trust Index^© Employee Survey.

Upside Learning scored a brilliant 78 on the TRUST INDEX^© Score which is an increase of 6 points from last years score of 72.  TRUST INDEX^© is an average of five dimensions of the Great Place to Work® Trust Index^© Model which are:

1. Credibility of management ™
2. Respect for people
3. Fairness at the workplace
4. Pride
5. Camaraderie between people

A few notable areas where Upside Learning Scored exceptionally where

1. Management is honest and ethical in its business practices – Upside Learning scored 97 points as against an average of 92 points from India’s top 50 Great mid-size workplaces
2. We are all in this together– Upside Learning scored 93 points as against an average of 90 points from India’s top 50 – Great mid-size workplaces
3. This is a physically safe place to work – Upside Learning scored 96 points which was at par with India’s top 50 – Great mid-size workplaces

About Great Place to Work® Institute

Great Place to Work® Institute is a global management research and consulting firm dedicated towards enabling organizations achieve business objectives by building better workplaces. Great Place to Work® Institute works with over 7000 organizations globally every year to help them assess, change, learn, and share.

The post Upside Learning receives Great Place to Work – Certification™ for the second year running first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Medium vs. Instructional focus
When designing a solution, the medium makes a huge difference to the output. As we mentioned above, the same idea for choosing a certain medium can completely wreck the design or add to it constructively depending on when it’s factored into the picture.

We realized that starting out with a medium in mind may derail the design thinking process. Before analyzing whether videos could be used to achieve the targeted outcomes, it is important to answer two questions, which will help manifest the design approach!

1. What is the learning value you aim to create?
2. Do you have instructional clarity throughout the curriculum?

If the focus is on in-depth knowledge of the model, a video-based approach would be decorative, ineffectual, high-cost clutter. If one were to go for an appreciation of the importance of the model, myth busting and situational skill building, videos could be a good option.

The medium isn’t the message
How technologically advanced (or y’know, fancy) a medium is, has nothing to do with how clear the instructional intention is. In fact, it could be easier to lose sight of instructional integrity when given a gimmicky thing to play with!

The need for UX is more pronounced when designing interactivities for videos as compared to other media. If things are constantly changing on the screen, the interactive elements have to be well designed, otherwise the assessment of learner performance is more clouded (than in other media) by lack of mechanical skill than actually improper learning.

Once, we had a round of exploration where we gathered a number of samples of interactive videos. This actually added to the confusion than prove to be a constructive exploration, that’s because our brainstorming was reduced to designing interactivities and trying to work in mechanics… all with no clue of why. While thinking that the video will be the solution, what we most primarily missed out on was:

• What was the learner supposed to take away from the experience?
• What was the instructional goal here?

To Experiment and Explore!

Given that it has very little visual/audio limitations, interactive videos as a medium can be useful to create a way to experience and reach the actual depth of the problem situation. It is most certainly possible to evoke these reactions or reach this depth with other media too; it’s just that it can be easier to do that through a video.

Design is shaped by instructional convictions
Videos are a wonderful way to bypass the false dichotomy of learning by doing vs. learning by observation. When you’re playing a video clip and explicitly being asked to observe or study a specific thing, whether the focus of analysis is in the video or in your reaction, you’re being taught excellent long-term learner behaviour: to engage with the content. That’s with just the externally added cues. Going further, breaking the fourth wall has so many opportunities for wrecking learner passivity if you can shoot custom videos for a course!

Doodle over documentation
Conversations and scribbles play a much larger role than storyboarding. To have everything driven by documentation makes an experience-oriented production more difficult. There have been times we were working with existing video clips rather than shooting our own. So it was important to really talk through what each of us in each function pictured and wanted to do. To capture discussions, we doodled.

What do interactive videos offer?

• A personalized experience where learners get a chance to navigate and create their own learning paths.
• Engagement that is deeper and memorable which helps retain information.
• Videos can involve learner participation through a game-like navigation and experience.
• Interactive videos can be used as a key performance or learning measurement tool to also track progress and develop meaningful learner insights.

Interactive videos create the simplest ways for each of us to see honestly whether we tend to unquestioningly consume content or engage with it. Here was a merry mix of what we learned over years, through different processes and pitfalls to challenges and opportunities. The biggest impact these years of learning and observation has left us with a thought that, it’s the instructional clarity comes before everything else.

The post Interactive videos as an effective instructional tool! first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

(If you’re new to this series, here is some brief background to help you catch up:

Given the unique training challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic poses for us all, this series explores the various considerations for delivering an effective VILT (Virtual Instructor-Led Training). I recommend that you read the first five posts in sequence, and then, you can even pick and choose what’s of greater relevance to you.

1. Training in a Corona-Hit World
2. Choosing to Conduct a VILT
3. Weighing eLearning vs. VILT
4. Focusing on Audience
5. Content Presentation for a VILT)

We had previously talked about the use of stylus writing devices for conducting a VILT. This kind of content presentation gives you the ability to dynamically structure content based on the session flow, audience response, and knowledge level. So, it’s worth considering equally flexible content structuring methods. Now there are so many ways possible, but keeping in mind that aspect of flexibility in particular, the one I’d like to discuss today is the use of concept maps.

The effectiveness of concept maps in learning and teaching has been borne out by any number of studies by now. A concept map is superior to conventional presentation decks in especially 2 striking aspects:

• It is non-linear
• It can contain any level of depth, even unevenly distributed curricular depth
• All the information can be seen at a glance (okay, so there are 3 striking aspects!)

But a concept map does more than simply ‘beat a slide deck’ – it is a powerful tool in its own right, and has a particular value in teaching. Let’s explore some of those reasons, shall we?

We create webs of knowledge. Deep learning requires that we construct such structure (or schema) when we learn, rather than try to have a floating, disconnected set of facts. The more closely we can connect a new web with our pre-existing webs, the more likely we are to retain the new information, integrate it with what we already know, see interconnections, and be able to understand it in various useful contexts. On a good day and without the unique challenges posed by a VILT, this is a tall order. In a VILT, it just makes sense to stack the odds in our favor!

Further, considering that we are likely to need more frequent breaks during VILTs, a visual structuring of content in this manner will help sustain continuity and connection in the learning episodes. Learners will be able to literally see where they are in the curriculum and why they are learning something.

The aspect of being able to see the structure of the content and the entire curriculum laid out visually, means that learners can observe the depth of their knowledge about a topic. They can maintain this clarity even in the middle of drilling down several levels in a complex topic. The visual support to maintain that ‘bird’s eye view’ simultaneously alongside the ‘ant’s view’ is a major boost for learning retention and future recall.

In the VILT, the facilitator can also carve out a section of the map to include concerns of application, integration into existing organizational processes, etc. to capture, integrate, and reflect employees’ concerns and performance contexts more strongly in the training. This will have a significant effect on the ability and readiness of learners to actually apply what they learn.

In particularly large organizations, courses can often be resource-rich, offering relevant organizational policies, SOPs, guidelines, forms, templates, etc. Like any encyclopedic repository, this is a double-edged sword: learners can feel like they have everything they could need to be able to meet the training outcomes or just as easily feel overwhelmed under the information overload. Remember, all of that repository material is after all in addition to the primary course material!

One of the wonderful things about a concept map is that it forces the creator to always link every node created to the rest of the structure. Learners are protected from the “the SME says you should know this” school of curriculum dumping, and instead get to know every element of the training, why it is included in the training, and how it connects to everything else. (No more random roleplays and vague talking head videos that leave you unsure of why on earth you must pay them any heed.)

In a VILT, where brevity and high-value are the main requirements of the design, this is a very healthy constraint/discipline for facilitators to embrace!

The sort of thinking we discussed when exploring the benefits of making the schema explicit and prompting active, layered reflection are a big part of metacognition. These ways of reflecting on our thought processes as we learn, help to regulate our learning behaviors and mental processes. As a result, we build not only a knowing of the subject, but also of our level of understanding, gaps in our understanding, the degree of connectedness with other things we know, etc.

This kind of behind-the-scenes knowledge of our minds as we learn is a critical component of the foundation that we need to eventually build for expertise. In a VILT, given the synchronous nature of the session, the facilitator can actively support and cue learners to do this.

As you can see from the ways that a VILT facilitator can interact with learners, a concept map becomes all three — curriculum, methodology, and agenda — for the session. It guides the facilitator to offer a richer learning experience.

Learners have a better sense of the flow of the session, are able to anticipate information and relate to it better. And so, whether they are conscious of all the manner of scaffolding or not, they are more engaged with the session.

Since we’ve talked extensively about mind mapping this time, I have a confession… At Upside Learning, we love our concept mapping! In fact, we have a custom, proprietary, fully responsive concept mapping framework so that you can even deliver eLearning in this manner, on all devices. With the foundation of this powerful framework, we can easily customize it to also be a valuable VILT teaching tool for your organization.

The Upside Learning mind map framework bagged Brandon Hall and LearnX Award as soon as it was launched! Why? Because it stands out from every other concept map software available, in that it supports not only concept mapping of your entire course content, but also the learning exercises and scaffolding interactivities that are essential for a robust, self-paced learning experience. Just contact us for a one-on-one demo, and we’ll be thrilled to show off our brainchild.

Looking to Go Virtual?
Talk to our Digital Learning Experts to understand how can we help you transform your ILTs to Digital Learning quickly and on a budget. Or write to us at elearning@upsidelearning.com

The post Concept Maps as a VILT Teaching Tool first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

(If you’re new to this series, here is some brief background to help you catch up:

Given the unique training challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic poses for us all, this series explores the various considerations for delivering an effective VILT (Virtual Instructor-Led Training). I recommend that you read the first two posts in sequence, and then, you can even pick and choose what’s of greater relevance to you.

1. Training in a Corona-Hit World
2. Choosing to Conduct a VILT
3. Weighing eLearning vs. VILT
4. Focusing on Audience )

What means will you use to present your content? To someone organizing or commissioning the training, the question can seem like a no-brainer or non-issue – but for facilitators themselves this is a really big deal! It makes a huge difference how easy or how hard it is to control the means by which you present the information, how dynamic and customizable the method is, how much you can control the pace of information loading, and so on.

The display (whichever kind you use) is the central focus that kind of makes your session more engaging and becomes your learners’ visual guide through the content. Managing your display properly, whether you’re creating it synchronously or asynchronously, is one of the critical classroom management skills that any teacher or facilitator must master.

As it is so important, let’s consider three of the most commonly used tools:

We have to start with this as it’s the most popular — good ole death-by-bullet-points! Actually, edgy criticisms of digital presentations have been around so long, they’re more clichéd than edgy – and the medium itself continues to thrive. You can make a presentation deck the site of a design murder or something very effective and elegant.

There is undoubtedly a lot that you can do with a presentation deck, and in many contexts, it is simply the most versatile, yet simple to use format. So yes, when it comes to digital presentations, we believe they’re not inherently doomed — just often poorly designed or misused.

The real drawback, though, is that your typical PowerPoint type program can’t hold non-linear or even linear multi-depth structure (think module-lesson-topic-page kind of structuring) too well. Oftentimes the curriculum structure is adjusted to adapt to the presentation tool than the content — and that’s obviously just wrong.

Then there is the real problem of perception: decks are widely associated with impending boredom. Starting off on a negative footing like this, it needs conscious effort to dissuade learners that this is not the case.

A good deck can significantly reduce the workload for the facilitator during the session – and mean a bigger workload for them before the session if they are the ones who have to create the deck! Frankly, even in a pre-corona world, our usual recommendation has been that it’s a good idea to outsource the design of the content to people like us and keep the delivery in-house.

When you’re considering a presentation deck for a VILT session particularly, consider the screen real estate you have: you have to look at your deck and your learners’ faces. The more learners there are, the harder it can be to keep track of both; and sometimes smaller device screens just make things doubly frustrating.

A final thought is about reference value. If you use a deck and make that available to learners after the session, that’s some solid reference value for learners (although sometimes, there is something to be said for not making things that easy…!)

Personally, I love old school whiteboards! I like being able to deliver a session where I have the flexibility of what I capture – how much detail, information shared by the audience and by me, supporting information for activities, and so on. Plus, it just helps subtly emphasize the importance of say, a term, or a concept when you actively put it on the whiteboard alongside your explanation. (The action cues learners to pay particular attention.)

This could be an excellent option if you can figure out camera and lighting. Let’s not forget that many of us are still working from home in ad hoc remote working setups. First of all, your facilitators are going to need to conveniently have a whiteboard lying around at home, markers that work (the real miracle!), good lighting, and enough clear space to have the camera at a proper distance to shoot the session. Plus, as your facilitators are just adapting to this kind of delivery and aren’t used to it, they are going to need to jump back and forth a bit to adjust the webcam focus and make sure learners can see the board (and the facilitator) clearly enough.

Additionally, in a VILT, you need to remember to not get caught up in the board and teaching, but to keep looking at your camera for eye contact with learners, and checking your laptop for what they’re sharing or asking.

There is probably higher engagement in the session (learners have to pay attention or you’ll wipe the board and move on and they lose out) but also absolutely no session reference for learners if they don’t make notes. The slow and distracted are left well behind and the ones who pay attention have a good experience.

In concept, this seems the best of both worlds, digital and old school analog.

If you’re not used to it, writing with the kind of tablet that designers use to draw can be next to impossible. It really takes a while to be able to control the stylus’ motion that smoothly. But with the variety of devices we now have – tablets and even laptops that support touch screens and screen writing, this is somewhat easier. You can install a doodle app and try out a digital pen. There is still definitely a learning curve, but if you persevere, you do have that ‘best of both worlds’ experience. The question is, do your facilitators have such hardware already, and do they have the time and feel the need to invest in acquiring the physical dexterity needed?

I keep saying this is the best of both worlds after that huge hurdle at the beginning, because while you make learners keep up and pay attention as with a whiteboard, you can save the whiteboard you create (take screenshots if the app doesn’t support saving) and share that later as a session reference aid.

It’s more dynamic than a presentation deck although it’s digital, and you can have collaborative building of content as with an old school whiteboard. You can also toggle the session nicely with e-interactivities and simulation nuggets and so on.

The common look out for all the methods (since we are talking of using them in a VILT) is with regard to connectivity variations: in poor bandwidth, it can get very frustrating for learners when the screen freezes; they see nothing and then you’ve leaped ahead to a whole new topic. Then it’s just levels of how disconnected they are in those lags between the different methods – there’s not a lot to choose from that way! At most, with a PowerPoint, you can share the deck with the learners to follow along, but you also run the risk of some folks kicking back, tuning out and deciding to skim the content later because they have the session material in hand.

I hope I’ve as usual given you a fair picture with the pros, cons, and considerations to weigh before you make your decisions. And remember, you don’t have to work through this maze alone: talk to us. We’re glad to help you navigate the many design choices that will affect your training’s effectiveness!

Looking to Go Virtual?
Talk to our Digital Learning Experts to understand how can we help you transform your ILTs to Digital Learning quickly and on a budget. Or write to us at elearning@upsidelearning.com

The post Content Presentation for a VILT first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Sushant has a rich experience in Client Engagement, New Business Development, Managing Key Accounts, and Digital Transformation. His zeal to assist organizations to understand, design, deliver, and improve digital technology-enabled solutions has helped many clients to achieve their desired learning objectives. Sushant holds a Masters degree in General Management with a focus on Marketing from ESCP Europe Business School, France.

Having studied and worked in Europe, Sushant has developed a deep understanding of the dynamics of the L&D market in this region and the challenges faced by the L&D community here and is always on a quest to assisting in innovating solutions to tackle them.

Amit Garg, Director and Co-founder of Upside Learning, commented, “We are confident that Sushant, with his enthusiasm to explore better learning possibilities and experience of the global learning industry, will help us increase our presence in Europe and by being closer to our clients in Europe and the UK, it will help us deliver better service to them.”

The post Upside Learning expands its footprint in Europe first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

(If you’re new to this series, here is some brief background to help you catch up:

Given the unique training challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic poses for us all, this series explores the various considerations for delivering an effective VILT (Virtual Instructor-Led Training). I recommend that you read the first two posts in sequence, and then, you can even pick and choose what’s of greater relevance to you.

1. Training in a Corona-Hit World
2. Choosing to Conduct a VILT
3. Weighing eLearning vs. VILT )

Whenever you’re in the middle of making decisions about training, it’s a good idea to step back and consider your learners specifically. Very often, institutional constraints, business realities, and practical compromises end up gradually erasing the learner from the picture: naturally, this spells disaster for the ultimate success of the program. If you want to change learner behaviour and have a real impact on performance, the person who is actually performing those tasks cannot be left too far behind in the race of competing needs! (Of course, if you are only looking at a checkbox training deployment to fulfil on-paper compliance, this matters far less…)

So, in our deliberations on whether VILT is a good option — and when it is a good option — let’s turn our focus to the learner.

There are some things that we anyway consider when thinking about conducting an ILT (instructor-led training). Now, there are just a few more aspects we suggest tagging on because of the “V” of the VILT mode of delivery.

We’ll begin with the more familiar paradigm of ILTs and then see what VILT further layers on those initial considerations.

Familiarity with Learners
Every trainer knows that the quality of interaction and the level of engagement in a classroom session depends to some extent on how well the trainer knows the audience being trained. If the two parties are new to each other, you invariably have to carve out a little warm up time explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly is in the sense that you will have icebreakers and kick-off discussions, to get everyone used to each other. Implicit in the sense that you will not launch into the core content or pick an aspect driven by discussion or intense activity – rather, you will start off light and easy.

This is true of any classroom; it is doubly true of a VILT. The only thing is, as we saw before, there may be a challenge in terms of making that design trade-off between getting your learners comfortable with the dynamics of participation vs. making as brief a session as possible.

Language Considerations
Always, with a synchronous medium, the learner has to keep up with the pace at which a session moves. If there happens to be a multilingual audience, any of whose primary language is not the medium of instruction, the facilitator has to strike an average so that native speakers are not disengaged and non-native speakers are not left behind. This is true for both ILTs and VILTs.

Class Size
Well, definitely the number of people you can accommodate in a classroom session is something to think of! But even if you discount a mob, you do have to think of the class size in relation to the content. There are some kinds of role-plays or activities that are necessary from a content perspective, but viable only for certain numbers of people. Just to be totally clear, I am not implying a blanket rule for role-plays in general – I am talking about the number of roles in a role play varying based on the content of each training!

Most times the digital medium itself means that many of these conventional activities will be ruled out. Okay, in that case, if you’re anyway adapting the design in that manner and ruling out these tricky parts of the training… are you in the clear? I’m afraid not. For example, you need to consider how many attendees at a time your platform will support.

Geographic Distribution
Of course, the more spread out your learners are, the more challenging it is to run a classroom session. Do you run a Train the Trainers series and scale up local capacity to run the program, is it something better done by one central team…? The answer could depend on a lot of other contributory factors, but essentially, this is a factor to think of.

It’s also quite obvious to associate this with a classroom training – there is also the logistical aspect of getting everyone to one place, right? Surely in the digital, work-from-home world we are in now, this shouldn’t matter for VILTs? Actually, it still does. We need to consider time zone differences because of the synchronicity of the medium. You would really struggle to work out a training time for combinations like SE Asia and South America, or the US and China!

The solution may therefore require multiple deployments catering to each time zone cluster.

So, these aspects we have considered up to now matter to any instructor-led session, physical or virtual.

What further implication does the ‘V’ of the VILT have for us?

Cone of Silence

Everyone in your audience attending your session should be able to do so within a ‘cone’ of silence at home. In our current world of ad hoc work-from-home arrangements and no childcare or domestic help and support, this is asking for a lot (if not the impossible!) from many. The training coordinator can only control managers and say “Free this person to focus on this training” — they cannot run interference with the learner’s 5-year old child, spouse, siblings, elderly parents, etc. and carve out dedicated and uninterrupted time to attend the training!

Missing Non-verbal Language
Anyone who has conducted even a one-hour training session knows how much we rely on being able to read facial expressions and body language as part of effective facilitation. There are many who hesitate to speak up and say they don’t understand something/ have a question. These cues are what tell us to stop and encourage the participant to speak up. Now, learners have an even more impersonal medium to cope with, and one in which participation is always less than face-to-face in a classroom. (And, Zoom fatigue is real, people!) So consider the effect of such a changed session dynamic on your learners and see if you might even need to consider support mechanisms to get learners to still engage effectively with the session, trainer, and content.

Context of the Space
Nobody needs an explanation of how distracting our personal devices can be when we are trying to work. Notifications and messages so successfully sabotage our concentration while we’re working to the point that a whole slice of the self-help and productivity industry is dedicated to solving this issue!

Now, many of our learners may be logging into work from personal devices. The separation of ‘space’ from personal life brought about by using a work machine, just disappeared. This has to be addressed and accounted for by facilitators and training coordinators. In a classroom training, you can still walk around and gauge who is looking at their work/personal phone a bit too much during the session. But with the virtual, distributed classroom – that is impossible. And it may not be a wilful disengagement from the session, even work (incessant mails, texts from up or down the line) can keep interrupting focus during training. We need to find ways to help learners manage these distractions.

Personalisation, Privacy, and Appropriateness
Our expectations for how employees conduct themselves need to change significantly, sometimes reasonably and sometimes less so. As we saw earlier, there have been lapses in conduct that range from understandable to inexplicable. Facilitators and learners alike have to be mentally prepared for the new normal. Facilitators particularly will have to moderate, and respond effectively to a whole new set of situations, even ones that have nothing to do with the training itself but impact the delivery and flow of the session all the same.

There is also a certain level of tech-savvy that facilitators need to acquire. (There is nothing worse than a facilitator who appears outdated — and hence incompetent! — about what’s happening with the platform.) For example, as we have seen with Zoom, anyone can later access a “private” session chat between two participants, rendering it not private at all. Think about the company confidential information that can be leaked as a result of perfectly natural, relevant exchanges between learners during a training! And that ‘Zoom-bombing’ has been added to our lexicon tells you just how much of a problem it is and how prevalent a phenomenon.

Mechanisms for Participation and Feedback
It’s not at all difficult to set up appropriate mechanisms to address the increased support that learners may need to be able to switch to a VILT-driven delivery format, but it does take a little thought and effort. L&D and facilitators have to coordinate and brainstorm to come up with effective solutions.

Similarly, even in-session and post-session feedback collection has to be handled differently for VILTs as compared to ILTs, needing perhaps a slightly different kind of organisation and collation.

Looking to Go Virtual?
Talk to our Digital Learning Experts to understand how can we help you transform your ILTs to Digital Learning quickly and on a budget. Or write to us at elearning@upsidelearning.com

The post Focusing on Audience first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

(If you’re new to this series, here is some brief background to help you catch up:

Given the unique training challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic poses for us all, this series explores the various considerations for delivering an effective VILT (Virtual Instructor-Led Training). I recommend that you read the first two posts in sequence, and then from this one on, you can even pick and choose what’s of greater relevance to you.

1. Training in a Corona-Hit World
2. Choosing to Conduct a VILT )

We talked previously about considering a VILT for your training needs. After seeing how many elements there are to consider, and how some of these can be as easily a disadvantage as they can be an advantage, it’s natural to wonder if your organization should consider eLearning instead. So, let’s address that today, shall we?

To choose between eLearning and VILT, we need to consider the following factors and each organization’s status where each factor is concerned.

At this time, it is important to be adaptative and responsive to the crisis. You may need to compromise and settle for a solution that is less than ideal, but is feasible for the need of the hour. It is better to have informed learners (even if they aren’t wild about the training experience), than uninformed learners with higher risk exposure. So, I would always recommend that you consider the entirety of the context you’re working in and be pragmatic.

Examples of things to consider:

• Full synchrony is no doubt more attractive, but how much time (of training organization, IT support, facilitator and employee bandwidth) is actually available?
• You may not get an innovation award for delivering a normal eLearning – it’s certainly not a new solution! But does it give a higher assurance of getting the job done in an optimal way?
• If the message to be conveyed is basic, short, and simple, don’t beat it to death especially now; see if even just a well-designed mailer or impactful infographic can get the job done.
• If you have an LMS set up already and have been delivering eLearning, and you don’t have the virtual set up for a VILT, now may not be the best time to explore it.

You will be relieved to know that neither of the options (eLearning or VILT) is associated right off-the-bat with a particular cost implication. So, both are probably viable for you from this consideration. For both, the actual price depends entirely on the design, what kind of content you are working with, the level of sophistication, whether it is a from-scratch training development or more of a conversion, etc. Neither of the delivery modes’ unique needs has a major cost impact.

Particularly in this time of flux, everyone’s schedule just got turned on its head. We’re working from home, without daycare, without domestic help, probably competing with a spouse and a child for broadband bandwidth and a spot in the house with decent Wi-Fi signal strength (assuming there is broadband at home), waiting in queues just to be able to pick up essentials, helping our kids with their sudden switch to online learning — not to mention some of us may have ailing or ageing family members who need to be looked after.

There are going to be a ton of distractions, interruptions and fails, adorable and otherwise. (See? Just lost you for 5 minutes there, didn’t I!)

So consider how lengthy, technical or dense the content is, and if it will be more merciful to give your learners a mode that can withstand the interruptions and distractions. The other aspect is also considering if they are feeling isolated and disconnected with their teams, if a discussion-driven training will be a relief and morale boost.

How many learners do you have to cater to, and across how many time zones do you have to coordinate for this training? – Remember to consider time zones not only in the light of learners but also all the support functions involved if this is to be a synchronous training: IT helpdesk, facilitation team, training coordinators, SMEs, and so on.

For that matter, you know how for some classroom trainings particularly to do with change adoption or incidence responses, you have to kick off the training with a quick opening by a senior stakeholder from the function? You do that because if your learners aren’t buying the necessity or importance of the training (and change in behavior), or the need for their cooperation right from that start, your entire training session is a write-off. Well, remember to factor that senior stakeholder’s time zone as well!

We have been in sessions where even to dial in the stakeholder, we did need to consider this because there were training bottlenecks where unless something was resolved from the business side, learners were just not ready to continue with the process training!

Which brings us to the next consideration…

A key element to think about is whether the VILT is going to be delivered by a subject matter expert in the function or an expert facilitator but without function specialization. Why does this matter?

Not everyone who is good at their job, is good at teaching that job interestingly and effectively, that too on a tricky medium like a VILT. And factor in that there is probably going to be more preparation needed from the expert ahead of the session just so that the virtual session goes smoothly.

On the other hand, a professional facilitator or trainer may be able to adapt more easily to the medium of a VILT, but typically for in-depth functional content, if there’s an opportunity to interact learners will ask technical questions as well. This is usually managed by partnering with someone from the business for the delivery of the session. (Either you have Q&A breakouts with the domain expert, or they are actually there for the whole session.) Coordination and the ability to huddle quickly and discuss what to do is just that little bit more harassing and unfamiliar with a VILT format.

There are some kinds of content that are better suited for a VILT than eLearning and somewhere the reverse is true. For instance, when you need a human touch to go with the learning message for a ‘soft’ push (for change adoption, or ethical or reputational aspects), personalized feedback, or the ability for learners to share and discuss perceptions, perspectives, etc. it is a good idea to consider VILTs than eLearning.

But there are times when a training is about a software system, or content that is similarly abstract enough that physicality of performance is a non-issue and straightforward cognitive performance may be more in focus. At those times, eLearning may be a better option to consider.

Then, there will be a third bracket of content to consider, which will not translate well in either of these formats. For example, specialized fire response, tying of knots, calibration of lab instruments — anything with a significant psychomotor component. Even if these were previously demonstrated in a classroom training, the camera work needed to convey the demonstration over a VILT is significantly of a higher level. It becomes tricky when you recognize that right now we are working from home so the facilitator will also be the camera person, and they have to ensure that they make the motions to be shown exactly at the right height and distance from their webcam. And hopefully, this is clear enough a transmission feed to the learners, who in turn hopefully have good enough broadband connections to see the whole demonstration without choppy lags. That still leaves a problem of how to tackle practice. In short, this doesn’t translate well to either format.

Pre-Corona, we used to have weekly yoga sessions in our office. And when it comes to even solutioning, at Upside we follow the yoga philosophy of ‘starting from where you are’. Just as suddenly one day you cannot (reasonably) tell someone to stand upside down if they can’t even bend to touch their toes, you cannot expect to seamlessly and perfectly deliver a whole new way of training overnight.

We need to consider what existing infrastructure there is to work with. The best solution would most likely start from there, because “the best” in training design is never a standalone concept – it is also “the best for a specific context and set of needs”.

If you’re considering investing in developing your training infrastructure, that’s fantastic! But consider this too — is the focus of the investment going to be for a way of life going forward or a makeshift requirement just for the present? We wouldn’t recommend huge investments of effort, time, or money for the latter while we would recommend investing those resources sufficiently for any long-term infrastructure. Organizations so rarely get do-overs, so these infrastructure-building activities are typically once-in-a-lifetime.

Never bank on being able to play video and animations over screenshares. Even in simple web presentations with corporate infrastructure and connectivity, this can get laggy and totally break the flow of the session. Now with the additional complication of a potentially overloaded residential broadband connection (see our previous post for why this is so), including rich media is doubly undesirable.

If you’re delivering eLearning over an LMS or content player that can only support online viewing, this may still be a problem. But if your LMS supports offline viewing (most modern ones do), or you get something like our custom offline player app as an add-on to your LMS, that takes care of most bandwidth problems for you.

…. That still leaves one glaring question, right?

You may have read through this post checking off points in favor of eLearning or VILT for your organization. But what if it’s a mixed bag, with combined factors to consider?

Well, honestly, that’s why we have about 50 awards recognizing our design capability! There would be no prizes for anyone if it was as simple as just using a checklist or formula for solutioning. Have a conversation with us, and we’ll be happy to help you unpack your unique tangle of considerations, challenges, and needs. We can work out what will be a best-fit compromise for your priorities.

Looking to Go Virtual?
Talk to our Digital Learning Experts to understand how can we help you transform your ILTs to Digital Learning quickly and on a budget. Or write to us at elearning@upsidelearning.com

The post Weighing eLearning vs. VILT first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

The chances of a VILT session being an effortless affair where you’re comfortably scribbling the critical terms, naturally sketching diagrams as you teach and learners are paying full attention to you as you do this… well, let’s say they’re about the same as your phone battery not dying on you when you’ve forgotten your charger.

While there’s a lot that can go wrong, there are some unique advantages – but more than either of these, there are some very loaded considerations that can cut both ways. Let’s look at those, shall we?

Everything happens on the screen.

Your learners ideally should not take notes on the computer – it’s always better for learners to handwrite notes because that way, they remember things better. In a VILT, you also don’t want to encourage your learners to have multiple screens open to toggle and get distracted by. You want them to pay attention to your presentation content, and to maintain eye contact (so to speak) with you.

But let’s not forget as well that, right now, most of us are working from home. There is a basic assumption that there will be enough elbow room and desk space to be able to do this comfortably and still not be out of sight of the camera.

On the other hand, nobody is going to have to keep ducking around a taller person to see the facilitator or the content in a VILT.

Lack of physical presence.
That’s fantastic in terms of logistics cost, effort and, particularly now, health safety. You do not need your travel team to be involved in organizing the training at all. Now, instead, you will heavily need IT support.

But think about it – how many times do we use face-to-face trainings as a chance to network, to have quick catch-ups, to even get to know our colleagues better, to keep a finger on the pulse…? For especially liaising roles, it is crushing that this is impossible.

It’s not all negative though: the introverts are probably cheering wildly. And everyone must love not having to drag themselves bright and early to report to a session when they’re still staggering from jet lag!

But for facilitators, particularly ones who are experienced in classroom training, this is a huge blow. Teaching is half performance art.

You rely on building engagement, connection with your learners and a certain energy in your session through your very presence. You move and circulate to check on each learner and see how they’re faring – and now suddenly in a VILT, you have the most minimal feedback to work with, not to mention near-zero control. That’s profoundly unsettling.

Session value is in magnified focus.
In-person sessions are simply more attractive a prospect for facilitators and learners alike. So now, take out the nice hotel or conference facility booked for the day, the opportunity to travel, the catered food and activities, the chance to hang out with colleagues and change up the routine, the chance for murmured bonding over coffee or smokes, networking opportunities up the ladder and across divisions… you’ve only the content left. No wonder learners are highly critical of what online lectures have to offer!

If you have an audience that is used to digital learning, this may not be such a battle, they may easily incorporate VILTs as well into their learning culture. But if you have learners mainly used to classroom trainings, you should be aware that MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) – which are basically built-out online lectures – have an atrocious dropout rate – nearly 95%!

Facilitators have to be absolutely en pointe in their course design and delivery. There is a very low tolerance or forgiveness for rambling or low engagement teaching. But equally, there are some famous and highly recommended courses too, widely recognized for the caliber of the learning experience they provide.

Learners are in charge of themselves.
Learners are individually responsible now for making arrangements such as finding a suitable environment free of distractions, suitable devices (e.g. a tablet or laptop for many courses, rather than a smartphone), high-speed broadband, etc. Remembering the times we are living in, even in the States, none of this is a given. People are suddenly at home without daycare, many people are used to depending on their smartphones for internet, even foregoing a residential broadband subscription… and we cannot expect them to change any of that (even if they would) right now or for the foreseeable future.

This is of course, however, a huge organizational burden that is reduced! Training coordinators will find their work halved – not to mention, the drop in IT, admin, logistics and catering support needed to make all this happen.

Another aspect of learners being in charge of themselves is with respect to self-monitoring, in ways that typically are part of classroom management. The facilitator can no longer keep an eye on everyone to see who is getting distracted by their phone, who is checking work mails during a group exercise instead of participating, and so on. (And you’d be surprised, but this is especially important when training senior employees!)

Crisp delivery is non-negotiable.
In any mode of training, I’m sure crispness is appreciated by learners and optimizing seat time is always in the organization’s interests as well.

But you also simply cannot expect someone to sit for more than 2 or 3 hours for a VILT. People will get restless, plus it is a significant strain on the eyes.

Additionally, your own organization would have (hopefully!) taught learners good ergonomics and how it is important to rest your eyes and keep switching your gaze every 20 minutes. Whoever plans and delivers the session has to factor that and also build in breaks to let learners stand up and move around regularly without disrupting the flow of the session. (You cannot just invite people to move around when they want, the way you might in an ILT, because whenever someone moves the facilitator can see nothing to retain eye contact and engagement unlike in a physical classroom.)

But equally validly, there are going to be training requirements in organizations that will need more than 2 or 3 hours to fulfill. A stringent, inflexible need for brevity is a very double-edged sword indeed, because this rapidly becomes unreasonable for some contexts.

Everything happens on the screen – yes, it’s worth mentioning again!
In terms of training reuse or reference value – it is a two-in-one kind of winner that you can create a synchronous experience for learners, but also record the session for anyone who misses it or wants to refer to it later. (And there is always that annoyance of one person joining a week after the session, who needs the same session!) Such session recording is effortless because it’s all happening on a screen.

In the same way, walking through or even sharing assignments and group work is definitely more efficient in the online session (assuming the instructor has made the necessary arrangements in advance).

But, not all content is suited for bulleted presentations and this kind of ‘delivery from a distance’.

When it comes to soft skills content, psychomotor skills training or even core process change trainings, which require an element of persuasion for adoption, overcoming resistant attitudes, it definitely makes a difference to be physically together versus spread out in private little bubbles.

In conclusion, you can see based on all these considerations, deciding on a VILT is not something to be done hastily or without adequate evaluation on a case-to-case basis. It is by no means a one-size-fits-all kind of solution… But then, how else would life be interesting?!

Looking to Go Virtual?
Talk to our Digital Learning Experts to understand how can we help you transform your ILTs to Digital Learning quickly and on a budget. Or write to us at elearning@upsidelearning.com

The post Choosing to Conduct a VILT first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Given the magnitude of change we are all dealing with in our organizations, naturally L&D teams are also hard-hit. Almost every organization has some part of the learning curriculum delivered by classroom training. Even in primarily eLearning-driven companies, you would find typically at least the leadership development programs having a classroom component. Sometimes, with a large frontline or very service-oriented industry, again, classroom trainings for certain topics have been indispensable.

With the way things have suddenly been disrupted by COVID-19, Virtual Instructor-Led Trainings or VILTs are a training format worth considering anew. Training cannot stop in a crisis; if anything, effective, supportive and timely interventions can become absolutely mission-critical.

Before we delve into VILTs, let’s consider other similar terms that are used. We at Upside prefer the term ‘VILT’. The reason for this will be clear once we look at the other similar formats: you may have also heard of online lectures, webinars, and online training.

Online Lectures:
Online lectures imply exactly that – you watch the instructor like you are attending a lecture, only you’re seeing them on a screen and not directly before you in real life. This is a format very popular even with huge virtual universities like MIT Open Course Ware.

Pros:

• As you can see from the example, these online lectures can be a complete, scholarly experience with supporting assignments, assigned reading and so on.
• They can be a one-off or a sustained series.

Cons:

While you have the illusion of being in a classroom because you get to see the teacher in action as though you were there, you miss out on a critical component of classroom engagement as a student – you’re not there, this is not synchronous, and so you don’t get opportunities to interact during the lesson.

Webinars:
Second, we have the webinars. Webinars are more common in a corporate context but they serve a slightly different purpose – they are meant to be informative not pedagogical. The focus is on the subject than the teaching or the audience. Typically, the webinar format is a slideshow that is accompanied by elaboration and perhaps a little explanation. These are synchronous sessions although recordings might be preserved for reference, so audiences may get to interact (albeit in limited ways).

Pros:
Webinars are useful when the learner’s purpose is knowledge acquisition through information gathering. They assume that the learner has the requisite grasp of foundational concepts and terminology, and is capable of independently applying metacognitive techniques to drive their own learning once they are offered information.

Cons:

• Webinars deliver information without any scaffolding or necessarily considering the audience mix or level of prior knowledge.
• There is very limited opportunity for audience interaction – typically, while there are Q&A portions, these are usually for short durations so that the presentation can be delivered as intended. Think of webinar dynamics as similar to meetings.

Online Training:

In intent, compared to the other terms we’ve seen, online training is closest to VILT, though it is still very misleading a term because online training can be so many more things! Online training is simply when teaching happens online – that can even be through pure eLearning with no facilitator, a simulation, a learning game… So, if you know your online training, ‘online training’ is a poor term! If you don’t, I guess it’s at least clearer than the others. For the purpose of this discussion though, let us take it at face value intent and say it means ‘having a person teach you, but it happens online instead of face to face’.

Because it’s so fluid a term, it makes sense to skip this one’s pros and cons and instead directly consider VILTs next.

VILT:
A virtual ILT happens just like a classroom session, only you aren’t in a physical room with the other learners and facilitator/instructor, and you use a virtual space as you would in a web meeting. It’s synchronous, you have to be there for the session at the planned time (although a recording may be made available for later reference). You can engage as you would in a classroom, raising doubts, offering ideas or perspectives, asking for clarifications, answering challenges set by the instructor, and so on. There could be group work, assignments, individual tasks, resources, supplementary or pre-requisite materials depending on the design chosen by the instructor.

Pros:

• There is opportunity for customized feedback to individual or groups of learners; opportunity for learners to learn from each other’s questions, and feedback.
• As a learner, there is also opportunity to freely engage as much as you would in a classroom.
• A good design makes this a very rich instructional format, with adequate supporting ‘e’ elements of training, such as pre and post assessments.
• The classroom format, even with the virtual component, is best for cognitively complex subjects and performance needs.
• This is also a fantastic format to consider when the human element is significant (e.g. for a topic like conflict management, critical stakeholder-facing or customer-facing tasks)

Cons:

• Session design has to be smartly done, or the instructor will end up under a much bigger workload – there is simply a lot more to track on the screen during delivery than just making a presentation.
• A set of technical skills and knowledge which has nothing to do with training or teaching are still required to implement this option successfully.
• The set-up of the classroom requires careful planning and preparation. For example, when we have migrated to online remote working during this crisis, a simple consideration – we may not all have whiteboards at home to write as we teach!
• You cannot see the body language of learners as you teach – you can only evolve some intelligent design features to compensate for the lack of this big source of feedback on engagement and understanding
• As a learner, you have to stare at a screen for way longer than an online meeting. Hopefully the instructor or instructional designer considers this and designs the session appropriately!

So… What’s Next?

Well, that was quite a bit to think about, wasn’t it. What we’re going to do, is offer a series exploring various aspects of VILTs in depth, keeping in mind the non-ideal and ad hoc circumstances under which most of us are working now. If your company already has a better setup in place, great – you have more options! But if it doesn’t, we’re going to help you ensure that you can still successfully run effective trainings even with minimal infrastructure and even by just ‘making do’.

The post Training in a Corona-Hit World first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.