Facilitate Proceedings

Recently I have been thinking a lot about distance learning and virtual instructor-led training. This prompted me to write an article, published in this month’s Chief Learning Officer Magazine, about how to make virtual learning more interactive and effective. I suggest four virtual learning strategies drawn from experience facilitating collaborative virtual meetings. These strategies particularly apply to leadership development, professional skills building and other types of learning that would traditionally be conducted in collaborative face-to-face workshop environment. This type of management training is rapidly transitioning to a blended or totally virtual learning experience and trainers will need to keep it highly interactive and collaborative.

Here’s a summary of the four virtual learning strategies. I invite your comments on the full article available online at CLO Magazine August 2009 Feature Article. You might want to consider subscribing to the digital edition of CLO magazine – it’s free and they have lots of interesting articles each month. CLO Digital Edition.

Strategy #1 – Apply successful tactics from face-to-face events
Everything we already know about running good meetings and collaborative workshops is relevant expertise bring to the design of a series of virtual learning modules. Moving to a virtual or blended learning format provides an opportunity to go back and revisit workshop or training objectives and create a combination of same time and different time learning activities.

Strategy #2 – Build trust and social capital to create readiness for collaborative learning
Time spent prepping the group will pay off in a more effective learning experience. Getting to know the participants and creating purposeful opportunities for them to connect with each other helps establish a trustworthy learning environment. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses helps you focus the learning agenda and determine what can be conducted offline and what needs to be real time.

Strategy #3 – Leverage technology to create interactive environments – more pull, less push
Shift course delivery away from one-way presentations to collaborative learning environments. Web meeting collaboration software [like FacilitatePro from Facilitate.com] offers virtual trainers options for creating highly interactive exercises with tools for brainstorming and idea generation, categorizing and organizing, voting and prioritizing, action planning and documentation.

Strategy #4 – Enable an environment of continuous improvement
Virtual training and virtual meetings tend be most effective when broken out into a series of short events spread out over a period of time, with a good amount of participant engagement in between. Building “learning circles” for sharing and interaction over the length of the training period is a great way to keep participants engaged and help them apply what they are learning.

The topic of how to improve the effectiveness of virtual instructor-led training continues to intrigue me. Coming from the world of facilitation and having transitioned from face to face to online meetings many years ago, I am excited to explore new ways to use the virtual learning space to engage more people, extend the reach of our learning methodologies, connect across cultures and organizational boundaries and build truly collaborative learning environments. I will share some design principles for creating interactive webinars in a future post.  In the meantime, as always, I welcome your comments.

posted by Julia Young

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