What is a virtual classroom?

Many of you reading this will already have participated in some form of virtual classroom learning. In its more mortal guise, the virtual classroom is an application of web conferencing technology. So if you’ve ever participated in a webinar, perhaps hosted by one or two instructors taking you through a PowerPoint presentation, you have already been initiated into the world of virtual learning. But like the true shape shifter it is, the virtual classroom can also take on the form of a self-contained (potentially even self-sufficient) virtual environment such as that of the 3D virtual world Second Life. And indeed, Second Life is used as a platform for education by many institutions such as universities, colleges and libraries.

The virtual classroom isn’t a new thing – distance learning organisations such as the Open University have been putting bums on virtual seats for decades. Following in their wake, the virtual classroom is increasingly discussed and used as a tool for workplace learning. In fact, Second Life also gives companies the option to create virtual workspaces in which employees can meet, hold events and training sessions, and even simulate businesses processes and new product prototypes.

The virtual classroom: it might not be very good

But the question is this: is any of this virtual learning any good? Could it, dare I say, be bad? Well, without going into too much detail, one of the much talked about benefits of the virtual classroom is its capacity for collaborative, peer-assisted learning. Groups of users can communicate in voice, writing (via chat) or video in real-time as well as fill out surveys and answer questions over chat or through polling systems. I don’t think I need to push this point any further. But does the fact that the virtual classroom is collaborative mean that the virtual classroom is good? I am not that sure that it does…

The ‘quality of learning/quality of participant’ ratio!

My reason for doubting the logic of such a conclusion lies in what could be called the ‘quality of learning/quality of participant’ ratio: the higher the standard of the participants, the higher the potential for learning. Anyone who’s ever participated in group learning (which is most of us) will agree that the standard of other participants’ contributions makes a huge difference to how much you can learn.

For instance, the virtual classroom can be a great tool for staff inductions. Video conferencing media, like Skype, can help staff to spread their knowledge to new members of the team. I have heard of some organisations that encourage staff to upload videos to the company intranet for new staff members to browse through for tips on how to do things such as access files when they’ve been deleted or claim back expenses. But such communal knowledge will only be distributed if the staff member responsible for doing so is actually experienced or skilled enough to:

a) possess the knowledge themselves; and

b) be able to teach that to another employee

Those two things aren’t a given and the last one certainly isn’t easy! Don’t get me wrong: if the virtual classroom allows staff to participate in staff inductions who wouldn’t otherwise have done so, that is great. But we need to make sure that this type of induction complements, rather than replaces, existing staff induction programs.

Perhaps the importance of the ‘quality of learning/quality of participant’ ratio comes into even greater relief during bigger group learning sessions like webinars (as opposed to a staff induction which is likely to be one-to-one). I have experienced some terrible webinars but also some really good ones. Usually the good ones are those in which the other participants are more knowledgeable than I am. I don’t mean to suggest that the bad webinars I’ve taken part in are full of people who are less knowledgeable than me; perhaps they are very knowledgeable but don’t know how to convey that knowledge to other people – that is, they aren’t teachers. Some people are competitive and might not like to share what they think ‘belongs’ to them. These people aren’t the best webinar buddies. Some people may simply be misplaced in a particular classroom session. Consider the classmate who, during an A level English literature class on WWI poetry, puts up their hand to ask the teacher whether Germany had ‘won’. Now ask yourself the question: how much learning would take place if everyone in the class was equally as knowledgeable about WWI history as this particular student?

What does this mean for virtual learning in the workplace?

I think we can safely say that the quality of your virtual classroom experience will be heavily influenced by the people with whom you share it. So my top tip for any organisation that is thinking of venturing into virtual classroom training is this: don’t be afraid of artificial selection. I am sure that your company is full of people with extremely mixed skill sets. Imagine that you want to hold a webinar on how to comply with competition law. Why not make sure that each of your webinar groups has a couple of subject matter experts (who may or may not be the webinar instructor) and make sure that each webinar includes a representative cross section of your organisation? That way everyone can benefit from the knowledge of someone else. You might find that it improves the quality of your webinar (or any other group learning session) in leaps and bounds!

We at Saffron don’t like to pigeon hole ourselves as simply training providers. Yes, we design and develop e-learning, but we do a whole lot more than that too. We’re all about performance improvement and people productivity, and there are more ways to achieve those things than training alone.

In this day and age, with advances in technology opening up all kinds of new possibilities every week, isn’t it time we all broadened our minds a little and started looking beyond training?

For instance, in the past it might have taken days or weeks to notify an entire sales team of updates to a product or service. Not only is that eating up time and money, it also means that for a certain length of time some people are selling the old version, blissfully unaware of the updates. Why not send update notifications direct to their mobile phone instead? That way, they know about the changes right away and can access the details again as and when they need to, at the touch of a button.

Likewise, if line managers are constantly flooded with emails or phone calls from new starters asking the same old question, why not find a way to let them ask and answer questions amongst themselves? Build a wiki, a forum, a portal or a fully fledged social network to facilitate this. With a bit of encouragement it will soon sustain itself, it can be used to start the settling in process before a new starter’s first day, it will complement any existing formal induction training and – crucially – it will save time and therefore money.

One thing that takes up a lot of time in every organisation is compliance training – if every employee needs to take several one hour courses every year or two, it soon adds up. But is it really necessary? How about offering staff the option to download a diagnostic assessment to a mobile device to determine whether or not they actually need to sit the full training course? If the assessment is designed properly, passing it provides confirmation of compliance in a fraction of the time it would normally take them to re-sit the same course they took the year before.

I could offer more examples, but the point is that there’s more than one way to skin a cat – if you need to improve productivity or performance and save time or money, a formal training course isn’t always the answer. These days, the possibilities are seemingly endless – with a little imagination applied to technological innovations, we can all achieve great things.

Last week I gave a seminar with my colleague Jennifer at Learning Technologies 2010 on the subject of social learning. We were pleasantly surprised to see a large audience spilling over into the aisles and (bar a few microphone issues) our presentation seemed to go down well. The theme of Saffron’s stand at the event was also social learning and, despite the lack of smoothies this year, attracted a lot of attention. All in all, over the two days I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the topic.

So, social learning: is it just the latest buzzword or is it something that’s worth taking seriously?

A few months ago I was pretty firmly in the ‘all talk, no action’ camp. And I still think that a lot has been said and not nearly so much done. But when I found out that social learning was our theme for 2010 I thought I’d better give it a bit more of a chance! Jennifer and I challenged ourselves with turning a few ‘traditional’ learning blends into social learning strategies. We picked a variety of recipes from the Blended Learning Cookbook (call centre training, language learning and compliance training), put our heads together for an hour over a coffee and surprised ourselves with what we came up with. You can see the results of our brainstorming here.

What I’ve learnt while preparing for the seminar and speaking to visitors to the Saffron exhibition stand is that most people are already persuaded of the benefits of social learning and are now looking for practical tips for implementing it as part of their L&D strategy. My top three recommendations are:

• Start small. Our Cookbook examples are designed to show what a well developed social learning strategy might look like, but don’t try to run before you can walk. And don’t think you have to make big investments to see a return – start by using what’s out there (follow Saffron’s lead by setting up a Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube channel, for example) and maximising any wikis and forums you’ve already got.
• Shout about it. Many a well designed forum has ended up languishing in a dusty corner of the company intranet because nobody actually knew about it. Let people know what you’re doing, why they should use it and how they should use it. And then keep telling them – find innovative ways to point them towards it (viral emails might be one way) and nurture it until it becomes so embedded in business as usual that it sustains itself.
• Remember the blend. It’s probably unrealistic to ‘go social’ for all your training solutions and it won’t always be appropriate. But social learning can really add value if it’s used in the right way as part of the right blend.

Over the past few months, then, I’ve been convinced of the potential of social media to add value to workplace learning – but what do the rest of you think? Would our new social learning recipes do the job? Have you already started adding social media to your training blend? Is social learning just a fad, or is it here to stay?

A little while ago I was on the phone and the person on the other end of the line suddenly interrupted conversation to say ‘there’s a man dressed as a blackberry walking around the office.’ At least, that’s what I thought he said. What he actually said was ‘there’s a man dressed as a BlackBerry walking around the office.’ I must be one of the few people in London who still thinks of fruit before phones.

Since then I’ve been thinking about the impact of technology on our lives these days and the pros and cons of this. In our line of work we spend a lot of our time thinking and talking about how to make more of technology. How can we use Facebook or Twitter to enhance our learning solutions? How can we move from formal training to a social media based approach? How can we deliver training to BlackBerrys and iPhones? How can we find new and ever more numerous ways to reach our clients’ employees?

Now, I fully support this in terms of offering learners an increased level of choice about how, when and where they learn. With most people spending around an hour commuting to work each day, many of those on public transport, it makes sense to offer them the option of using that time to catch up on their learning and training requirements. And I agree with Clive Shepherd that ‘new thinking and new media are no longer the province of pioneers and geeks’ – these things are clearly here to stay (in some form or another) and we need to keep ourselves at the forefront of new developments. But I can’t pretend I’m not concerned about what we as an industry might be doing in terms of contributing to our growing national reliance on – in fact, I’d go so far as to say addiction to – technology.

I’m not suggesting that I’d like to return to the days before mobile phones (being the kind of person who’s usually very early and having the kind of friends who aren’t big on planning ahead, I’d spend a lot of time waiting around or being stood up if I had to rely solely on landlines). But there is a part of me that misses the days when people talking unnecessarily loudly into their brick sized phones was as intrusive as technology got. These days our lives are dictated by the politics of Facebook friendships, network coverage and battery life. Umbrellas have been replaced as the most perilous hazard on the high street by technophiles who stroll and surf the net rather than looking where they’re walking. And romantic restaurants are no longer the domain of loved up couples, but rather of loved up couples, the flashing lights and ‘discreet’ vibrations of new messages and frequent furtive glances just on the off chance that a message managed to sneak through unnoticed.

I’m not alone in this: in an article about the damaging effect of technology on relationships recently featured in The Times, Emma Cook writes that ‘we’ve long know about the compulsive allure of the “CrackBerry”, as well as its younger upstart the iPhone, but with the advent of Facebook, and particularly Twitter, a new level of distractedness is developing.’ And Cammy Bean, devoted to her iPhone, admits that – along with Twitter, blogs, Facebook and emails – it destroys boundaries between work life and home life (a threat which people who work from home are particularly susceptible to: as Cammy says, ‘my office is my home, my home is my office’).

Of course, it’s not all bad, but not everyone has given in to the allure and demands of social networking, video sharing and the blogosphere – and it’s this that I think we’re in danger of forgetting. Not everybody likes the fact that they are contactable anytime, anywhere. Not everybody feels anxious if their BlackBerry is in the next room rather than their pocket. Not everybody defines friendship in Facebook terms. Not everybody understands the draw of real time status updates throughout the day.

At the moment, all this technology means that we’ve got much more choice in terms of how we get information – whether that’s news updates, cinema times and gossip between friends or company updates and training sessions. But we need to make sure we strike the right balance, continuing to capitalise on this without overdosing on it (or, more importantly, forcing other people to overdose on it). I’m all for using Twitter and Facebook to offer people a new way to learn if they want to. What I’m not all for is creating learning solutions that are entirely dependent on these things. Just as some people prefer to learn through video and others through reading, some people appreciate training being delivered to their fingertips when they’re on the train or at home with their families and other people don’t.

So I say, let’s make sure we continue to offer choices, catering to the already techno-addicted, the techno-curious and the techno-minimalists. But I suspect I might be venturing into controversial territory here – am I alone on this side of the fence or are there others out there who share this view?

I recently had the pleasure of working with some of our clients in the USA – a trip which I remember well for two journeys that I experienced. On the way to Heathrow, a young man in his twenties picked me up and no sooner had I got in, he started to tell me how the world was soon going to come to an end. How the government had stolen every opportunity and how he had been robbed of his future. He complained that ‘they’ were all corrupt and the working man was footing the bill. When I asked him what he was doing to make the situation better, he said “I’m just a taxi driver, what can I do?” Needless to say the ‘Welcome to Heathrow’ sign couldn’t come quick enough.

As I landed at JFK, I found myself thinking of strategies to avoid a conversation with my taxi driver. Having been subject to a depressing monologue in West London, I really felt I’d be searching for Valium if I had to go through the same thing again all the way to Manhattan.

Unsurprisingly the cabbie at JFK started to talk as soon as I hopped in. To my delight, however, the conversation took a different tone. “Sure things are hard” he said, “but what you gonna do, stay in bed all day?” he asked rhetorically. His entire view on life was that he controlled his destiny and although his fare income had dipped he was making up for it by working weekends and saving money where he could. “There’s nothing to worry about” he said, “as always, we’ll pull through and come out stronger – that’s what we Americans do.”

The point? The point is that as learning and development professionals we can learn from this story. Times are hard and things are difficult. Budgets are being cut and some of our colleagues are having to leave their positions. However, it falls on us to lift our organisations and to find new ways to improve morale and performance within the teams that we support. We have to break away from the traditional approaches and models; even e-learning (and maybe especially e-learning) needs a rethink. Do we need a course on project management or will a carefully crafted set of links do the job? Do we need to bring in a consultant or can we use a wiki to share best practice? Is the three day classroom course necessary or can we create a blend? Is e-learning the only way to run our compliance programmes or can we use our mobile devices? When we build programmes, can we build them with re-use in mind and share the assets across the organisation?

It’s really down to us to drive our businesses forward and to support them in these difficult times and I believe that now, more than ever before, L&D has the chance to shine. So my message is this: push hard and be creative – think three times about the return your programme will bring and the other ways that you could do it – what else you gonna do, stay in bed all day?

Recently, an increasing number of our clients have been asking us about having videos in their e-learning, but are they always the best training solution? The second part of Dr Itiel’s seminar at the LT show examined the use of video as a training tool and, in particular, he compared the impacts of using interactive videos versus non-interactive videos on learning and retention.

His experiment involved teaching employees about health and safety in the workplace using three different styles: interactive video, non-interactive video, and non-interactive video plus a classroom discussion afterwards. The video content used was the same in all three videos, the only difference being that the interactive version required the learners’ input during the video. For example, they were asked to point the cursor at potential hazards or problem areas, or they had to answer questions for which they then received appropriate feedback. Dr Itiel then set all learners an assessment based on the video content to test their retention of the learning and the results were:

• Non-interactive video: 40.83% correct answers
• Non-interactive video plus classroom discussion: 64.44% correct answers
• Interactive video alone: 73.22% correct answers

It’s no surprise of course that the non-interactive video was the least successful. We know from any type of learning that just telling people information is not as successful as getting them to interact and come to a conclusion themselves. Watching videos is passive, it’s very easy to drift off and start thinking about something else, but successful learning can never be passive. Interactive videos force the learners to be continually involved in the video keeping them focused and enabling them to understand and practice the learning points.

Another interesting result from the experiment is that the blended learning solution of having a classroom discussion follow-up after the non-interactive video still did not yield better results than the interactive video alone. As classroom training can be a drain on both time and budgets, this is great news in a credit crunch! However, before we all start making interactive videos it’s worth remembering that video is not always the best solution for every training need. There are some topics that, even with extreme creativity and ingenuity, really can’t be taught through the medium of video, interactive or otherwise. And of course, videos can exclude some audiences, for example those with visual impairments, and can’t serve global needs so easily due to language requirements. So, next time your client wants a video, remember Dr Itiel’s results and see whether you can use an interactive version – your learners’ results are bound to reflect your efforts.

What do you understand by “proof of learning”? For many organisations it seems to mean one or both of the following:

• At the least, it means test results stored in a Learning Management System. The learner took the course and answered the knowledge test questions at the end.
• Additionally, the learner may have completed a “happy sheet”, supplying additional information about the learning experience.

If you’re familiar with Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model (50 years old but still a great improvement on its successors), you’ll recognise that these “proofs of learning” correspond to his Learning and Reaction levels of evaluation.

So what’s the anomaly? We recognise that workplace learning needs to be about behaviour (Kirkpatrick level 3), about the day-to-day choices that people make in their working lives. That’s true whether we’re talking about traditional and instructor-led training, e-learning taken by an individual, or what is now called “workplace learning 2.0”, shared by a community. And we know that running off test score reports from the LMS won’t help us to predict how people will behave.

It may seem I’m making the familiar case for scenario-based training, but that’s not the argument I want to rehearse here. Instead, I want to draw a connection between proof of learning and performance management, by looking at consistent, recurring requirements for personal responsibility from HR departments, both private sector and public sector:

• Managers must manage, by taking responsibility for the performance of their staff and not trying to pass this off to HR, especially when it comes to under-performance and discipline.
• People must take responsibility for participating in their own development.
• The organisation must develop a culture of continuous performance improvement.

Let’s turn our anomaly into an opportunity. One way to satisfy these requirements is for managers and teams to engage in continual conversations about behaviour and performance, about those day-to-day choices. In other words, we need to give more attention to coaching.

But this is not simply the coaching of yesterday. Frequent face-to-face meetings are a luxury that many teams can’t afford; in any event, the “lesson” may be learnt only once, by the participants. Likewise for coaching via email. This is where the Web 2.0 technologies – from blogs, wikis and podcasts to on-line forums and Twitter – enter the picture. Using these, we can turn each coaching event into a persistent training resource.

Proof of learning comes from behaviour, not from knowledge tests. To deliver the behaviour your organisation needs, be sure to add continual performance management and coaching, supported by today’s technology, to the learning and development blend.

 [This entry is based on my Extreme Blending talk at Learning Technologies 2009.]