People in an organization learn differently with different styles and techniques. This blog post should give you a short outline on how to maximize the reach of your learning content:
- Different channels
Verify the channel by which you are transporting content and offer learners a choice. Some people prefer short videos by which they are
guided through the content, others enjoy the tranquility of a written step-by-step guide to work solemnly in their own pace. The first example is broadly used amongst students for example, which can be shown by the vast number of tutorial channels about nearly anything a university could teach on Youtube. This also includes lectures like the ones from openSAP. Other channels can be simulations or outside speakers.
Giving learners the chance to engage in learning the way they like increases the engagement in the topic because you lower the burden to start with a new topic at all. This can also be considered as an empowerment to the learner. Important is that you define a central repository for all your learning content to make it easy to find and easy to consume. It is also much easier to check the content for necessary updates if you are using a central repository for learning content.
- Make the value and the objectives clear from the start
Time is money and money is always short. This makes it necessary that the learner understands what the benefit of the invested time will be. This can be realized in two ways: Make the objectives clear and show the learner how the content relates to their daily work. For some content, e.g. the introduction of new HR-IT systems, it is also important to connect the dots and provide context for the learner and make the bigger picture and targeted benefits clear for them.
- Engage the learner and check for understanding
The time on teaching and learning is well spent if the participants have reached a higher level of knowledge than they had before. You can check this after a session by letting the participants
- demonstrate the newly acquired knowledge
- solve an exercise
- run interviews with each other to clarify open questions or to ask questions to check for knowledge
- draw out what they have understood from the shown material
The last point might be a bit tricky and not suitable to each and every topic, but it is a good cognitive exercise to translate written or spoken content into another form.
- Make use of a Q&A or Whiteboard
Some questions during a course are interesting but would lead to a too far deviation of the course topic. Sometimes there might be good ideas to improve certain features of the shown topic. In either cases, a Q&A board or a Whiteboard do come handy. Collect all the questions or ideas on which you cannot follow up immediately. The participant will feel valued and you have additional input to improve your session or your topic.
- Mind the participants
When you are doing a virtual enablement session, give the participants a chance to influence the speed of the session. Introduce red and green flags to indicate if you should go slower or faster with the content. If you are using Adobe Connect, you have such indicators build in by default.
