Virtual learning has become incredibly popular for employees to advance their education or professional development. Virtual learning requires different methods of instructing than traditional, in-person training sessions, so it’s essential that when instructors are transitioning to virtual learning- they start to adapt or develop their skills to an online learning environment to make their materials effective and engaging for learners.
Here are 3 strategies you can implement to improve your virtual learning environment and make your training sessions a successful experience for both you and your learners.
- Engage With Your Participants
In a virtual learning environment, engaging your participants looks a little different than in-person training sessions. When running virtual learning sessions, it’s vital that instructors establish their virtual presence at the very beginning of the session.
Tips to accomplish this:
- Keep your energy high to set the tone and maintain engagement
- Establish ground rules – such as video needs to be on whenever possible (we know situations arise where this doesn’t work)
- Call on individuals to participate – let them know this upfront so there are no surprises
- Every 4-8 minutes create a need to participate – polls, whiteboards, activities, discussions, chat contributions, matchups of the content shared, set up debates – these activities will keep participants curious about what is happening
- Create A Supportive Learning Environment – Before, During, After
As a virtual learning instructor, you have an opportunity to create a supportive online community for your learners. The best way to achieve this is through encouraging both instructor-to-participant engagement and participant-to-participant interaction. Establish opportunities for you to be involved and for participants to take ownership for their own learning and application.
Tips to accomplish this:
- Before training, have participants contribute their own short bios or introduction to the group. This helps everyone know who will be attending. Send an example for others to follow
- During training, plan on multiple breakout sessions with small groups of 2-4 where participants need to prepare and share work examples. This helps participants understand their similarities creates deeper conversations and builds bonds.
- After training, create an open forum or discussion board where learners can post to request help and assistance from each other, developing peer-to-peer support.
- After training set up small groups, similar to traditional workgroups, for supportive mentoring of fellow learners.
- Use A Hybrid of Virtual & In-Person Learning For Better Engagement
These days, we’re fortunate to have the technology to create virtual learning environments that allow us to collaborate and engage both virtual and in-person participants as if we were all together.
Tips to accomplish this:
- Our virtual learning platform VirtualGlass™ is a good option for exciting, fun, interactive and experiential activities that are all on one platform.
- The virtual learning platform is easy for participants and facilitators to use and many activities can be modified to suit your client’s needs.
- VirtualGlass™ works exceptionally well with hybrid learning as participants in-class and those virtually can complete the same activities at the same time!
Find out more about VirtualGlass™ and how it can bring more engagement to your virtual sessions here.
- Ensure Learning Has Follow Up
As we’ve come to learn over the past few years- the best and most impactful training sessions use a combination of both synchronous and asynchronous activities. Creating a blend of synchronous hybrid learning sessions and asynchronous follow-up that participants can access at their own level, will boost application ownership and behavior change.
Tips to accomplish this:
- Before designing the blended learning solutions, identify the organizational goals to accomplish and the individual behaviors required to achieve these goals
- Once this is identified, consider on the job activities an individual can do to demonstrate, apply and practice the learnings and behaviors
- Create checklists for direct managers to use in supporting learners to implement their learning
