One of the great things about Covid was that it created the opportunity to design and build new things, innovate the way we do business and deliver new products for the ever-changing needs produced by a global pandemic. There wasn’t a single industry that wasn’t impacted in some way over the last 18 months or so. As a training and development company, at Glass of Learning, we were used to in-person training, creating learning experiences that were engaging, experiential and interactive. When everything went online, we needed to adapt in a hurry.
To begin with, we all quickly became adept in the virtual meeting space with Zoom and Teams and learned several of the tools on those platforms to help make learning a bit more interesting. By trying out numerous other online platforms and apps, it still felt like things fell short of how we wanted to deliver our learning programs.
The challenges we faced converting from classroom to virtual included teaching our program participants how to use multiple learning platforms for interactive components, company firewalls preventing access to many of the interactive tools, and capturing team discussions in an easy format that could be saved and distributed post-program.
In our exploration of a wide variety of solutions, we learned a lot and decided to create our own platform to use for our virtual learning engagements. VirtualGlass™ is a one-stop shop for engaging learning solutions that can be tailored to the needs of our clients. Here were some lessons we learned along the way.
Hire a good developer – we were lucky enough to already have a developer on our team who was able to understand our training needs, take our ideas and translate them into online activities.
Create the platform – our first step was to create one platform that could house all of the activities we were going to use with our participants. That way, they only had to learn one new platform instead of several of them to access our learning activities. It saves a lot of time during training sessions!
Create individual activities – once the VirtualGlass™ platform was created, we started with our popular in-person activities to build experiences that were easy to learn and use by our clients. Activities range from simple to complex. Some are more like flip chart experiences, others are like a choose your adventure set of scenarios that participants need to navigate through, while others require manipulation of shapes or card decks to achieve an outcome or solve a problem. Some are connected to assessments, to help debrief results and create understanding for participants.
Develop with flexibility in mind – we created the activities with flexibility in mind so that we could swap out logos, instructions or debrief questions to allow for easy changes depending on client need.
Check out this video for more information about VirtualGlass™ and what it has to offer. VirtualGlass™ proved to be the missing link in engaging virtual learning. For more information Contact Us and we will show you the platform.
