March 2020, a dreadful month where we witnessed the world come to a standstill. Not only businesses around the globe had a setback, but every individual was surrounded by uncertainty of what is going to happen next. Employees had to pick up their office belongings overnight and head home without knowing when they would be meeting their colleagues next in person. People who were not accustomed to work from home, found it overwhelming at the beginning with long work hours, drawing a line between personal and professional lives, getting a home office space set up, having stable internet connection, and managing remote teams amongst many other challenges.
That being said, Learning and Development (L&D) teams across different organizations were a bunch not prone to the pandemic. They too had to face immense challenges. For starters, businesses were looking to save and have maximum cash in the bank available to sustain the uncertain future and sail through turbulent times ahead which they were anticipating. The obvious measures they had to take is cutting down on costs and as we know L&D has always been considered a cost center and not a revenue generating arm of an organization, so there was no hiding. There were teams which got downsized, pay cuts were observed and projects stalled as few immediate measures taken by the business to reduce costs. Having said that, employees still had to be trained. Be it new hire onboarding, sales trainings, compliance trainings and many more mandatory trainings which had to go on.
Organizations who already had a digital learning ecosystem in place like a Learning Management System (LMS) and eLearning programs could transition faster as they were accustomed to this medium of delivering trainings. But organizations from traditional industries like manufacturing, who were only reliant on classroom trainings also commonly known as Instructor Led Training (ILT), found it a nightmare to deliver trainings online. The immediate overnight solutions such organizations had was to take their existing PowerPoint (PPT) decks used in classroom trainings and share their screens via online conferencing platforms like Adobe Connect, Zoom, WebEx, MS Teams to name a few. A good stop gap solution but not an everlasting one. Soon they realized that this wasn’t the most engaging and efficient way to deliver trainings as learners couldn’t get engaged and hooked on to the same content virtually as they did in a classroom setup. You can imagine if you were asked to sit in front of a computer for eight hours straight to go through a training program, what would that entail. A nightmare, isn’t it? Terms like “Zoom Fatigue” were going around social media with everything going online, not only training. The solution to this problem was not at all simple but very custom to different organizations depending on how badly they wanted to train their workforce and the investments they were ready to make. This was a time where we slowly started seeing a rise for Virtual Instructor Led Trainings (VILT) and adoption of self-paced eLearning modules.
It was during this time, custom content development companies like PassionPro Learning Solutions started receiving more requests than ever from its customers to convert classroom ILT’s to VILT’s and eLearning formats. This was nothing but a blended learning approach many organizations started heading towards seeing the benefits of increased engagement, retention and making learning available in the flow of work and at the time of need. In simple definition, blended learning is the approach to education that combines online educational materials and opportunities for interaction online with physical based or now even virtual based classroom methods. So, does it mean blended learning is something new? Not at all. In fact, it has been around for many years and organizations across the globe have been leveraging this approach way before the pandemic to successfully deliver trainings to save cost and time. If anything, the pandemic just accelerated the adoption of this approach as it became a “must have” rather than a “good to have”.
Coming back to an interesting customer we supported to convert their classroom training programs to blended learning. As part of the solution, our experienced learning consultants and instructional designers went through the whole classroom training experience through pre-recorded sessions, facilitator guides and participant guides. Then, we broke the curriculum down to different chunks where the core content was restructured to be delivered through VILT’s, and the remaining was converted to self-paced eLearning modules where the learners could go through at their own pace. For VILT’s, we had restructured the content and made it more concise, adding different virtual activities which replaced the in person physical activities in a classroom like having breakout rooms, using polls and other such elements which the virtual platforms could provide. This was useful to keep the learners engaged throughout the sessions. Also, as learners would mostly be seeing a PPT deck online throughout the virtual sessions, it was imperative to visually enhance the PPT decks to make it look more attractive with use of infographics, high resolution fresh images, videos and other such elements rather than just plain text and image slides. So, this was the VILT part. On the other hand, when we started developing eLearning modules, we made sure to assess the learner personas to see what would work best for them. Using some of the latest learning interventions like gamification, micro learning nuggets, short interactive videos were a few solutions we developed which was then rolled out to the learners via their LMS. As we know assessments are a big part in order to understand if the learners have grasped the concept and hence, we made those online which was then easily tracked by the LMS, and reports were generated, or certification was allocated accordingly. Overall, it ticked all the boxes, and a successful learning strategy was rolled out.
Looking into the future, the virtual and digital learning penetration is just going to increase day by day with increase in use of technology and internet connectivity. So there definitely is a broader horizon to learning approaches like blended learning as it is here to stay giving both the L&D teams as well as the learners the flexibility to develop and consume content. Another driver to this is remote working or hybrid working. Many organizations have permanently switched to work from home and for them, this would be the go-to learning strategy and even for the others, you never know what uncertainties still lie ahead of use which will keep us contained to the four walls of our houses. Not meaning to be negative here but I think we have seen the repercussions of the earlier setbacks due to the pandemic so why not be ready before hand and better prepared this time. Let us know what you think!