Blending Traditional and Virtual Classrooms

In the previous blog article I suggested that the virtual classroom doesn’t need to threaten the traditional classroom. And, in the article prior I described how Bob and I are finding greater fulfillment as trainers in the virtual classroom than we have typically found in face-to-face training. None of this suggests that traditional training should ever disappear.
Tim Bosworth’s comment “Don’t forget that there’s still value in old-fashioned, face-to-face learning” is an admonition we all need to heed. Here are some of the unsurpassed strengths of the traditional classroom:

Connecting
The personal connection that can take place when people gather in person is certainly unmatched. The time required to forge this connection is generally short and the sustainable strength of these connections is what keeps me engaged in face-to-face training.

Escaping
One of the great challenges we experienced with eLearning 24x7 is that learners have continuously struggled to find the time during their work to learn at their desktop. Continuously interrupted learning in the workflow is tough work. Again, Tim Bosworth’s comments on the last blog ring true:

“It's a different kind of learning. You're sitting in your office or home, all the old familiar cues are around, that report you have to get done before you knock off for the day is sitting in front of you, your secretary is telling you your boss needs to see you ASAP, so on. It's just a different venue than going to a place and putting the world aside for a period of time. If you're going to do e-learning, you have to make sure that you are going to "teach" the kind of material that can be taught in that environment.”

The traditional classroom certainly helps here. Some learning merits our escaping from the workplace so real learning can take place—uninterrupted.

Adapting
The most fundamental gift a trainer brings to training is the capacity to observe performance, provide immediate feedback, and check to ensure that the performance of the learner adapts appropriately. Not all training requires this kind of immediate feedback, but when it does, face-to-face training is vital.

Collaborating
When skill development isn’t singular but collaborative, the traditional classroom becomes a crucial environment. Collaborative work has, at its core, moment-to-moment exchanges of interpersonal effort sustained by trust. A group of people don’t simply master skills independently and then naturally collaborate. Most collaboration skills are best developed in a setting that provides people opportunity to intermingle their skills and in doing so develop the trust required to sustain future collaborative efforts.

Interacting
Interpersonal interaction skills are similar to collaboration skills but with these skills an individual interacts with others in the context of a specific situation (e.g., applying listening skills to resolve a communication problem or sales skills to make a specific sale.) The development of these kind of skills calls for interpersonal practice with real-time feedback. Today, this type of learning is best accomplished face-to-face. This is not to say that preliminary skill development can’t be achieved elsewhere by other means, but in reality, the traditional classroom, is the best place for polishing these kind of skills.

The Virtual Classroom Lets Us Use the Traditional Classroom More Effectively
In the past, when training has required an instructor, we haven’t had the option to safely offload learning requirements that don’t require the level of connecting, escaping, adapting, collaborating, and interacting described above. The virtual classroom allows this.
A crucial question for us to always ask is “What is it that we can only accomplish by physically gathering together to learn?” Everything else should be pushed to other learning modalities, and, whenever an instructor is still needed, the virtual classroom can most certainly deliver high-yield learning.

The Strengths of the Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT)
In addition to the capacity of VILT to extend the borders of the traditional classroom, there are other compelling reasons for organizations to add VILT to their learning options arsenal. Here are some:

First, VILT doesn’t require travel. Many organizations simply can’t afford the costs of pull-out training.

Second, VILT imbeds learning into each learner’s workflow. This is an advantage over the discontinuity inherent in full or multi-day courses.

Third, VILT allows training to scale more readily to a large, dispersed workforce in a constantly changing environment.

Fourth, VILT allows learners to learn a bite at a time in the context of their work rather than all at once and away from work.

Fifth, through spaced learning, VILT allows learning to transfer more readily into the personal work streams of learners.

Unfortunately, much of what is happening today in the virtual classroom fails to take full advantage of these strengths. Dean Bennett posted a comment regarding the last blog that puts it best:

“The future, with its plethora of communication media offers huge potential for more engaged, active and sticky leaning. I think we are still in the early stages of understanding its full potential.”

The good news is that there is a growing community that is actually doing this. They are taking the virtual classroom beyond the one-way content dumps that have been taking place in the name of “webinars.” Instead, these professionals are designing, developing, and delivering “high yield training in the virtual classroom.” They are achieving a healthy balance between traditional and virtual classrooms, maximizing the strengths of both. They are growing populations of learners who are finding in the virtual classroom a rigorous learning experience. Stay tuned to this blog and we’ll share with you how they are doing just that!

The Role of the Virtual Classroom

During the past year, there has been a major spike in the use of the virtual classroom as an alternative to the traditional classroom. There are many reasons why this is happening and why it is wise to do so. Here are some:

First, organizations have significantly cut back funding, forcing learning leaders to look for ways to deliver instructor-led training without travel.
Second, many organizations are less willing to pull their employees out for full or multi-day workshops. They would rather have the learning imbedded in the workflow, which is what spaced learning using the virtual classroom allows.
Third, the virtual classroom also allows training to scale more readily to a large, dispersed workforce in an environment that is continually changing.
Fourth, learners increasingly prefer to learn a bite at a time in the context of their work rather than all at once and away from their work.
Fifth, organizations are finding that when learning is spaced over time, there is a greater likelihood that skills will transfer more readily into the work-life of learners.
Although these are all excellent reasons for incorporating “Virtual Instructor-Led Training” (VILT) into an organizations learning landscape, there is another reason, that for me, is the most compelling.

Old Ways Die Hard
My parents were school teachers. We also had a dairy farm. One day, after my father had endured a rough day meeting with parents, he looked at me, as we were putting our boots on to go to the barn, and said, “You know, the more I’m around people, the more I like cows.”I have grown to understand dad’s thinking. Cows, for the most part, are much easier to manage than people. For example, anyone who has tried to herd cows knows that it’s not hard to do. All you have to do is get them going in the right direction and avoid getting them spooked.

Thirty years ago, when I entered the learning profession, we all herded learners like I had herded cows. We drove them into classrooms, shut the gate, and fed them wonderfully designed training programs, doing all we could to “avoid getting them spooked.” Afterwards, we turned them loose, to graze on their own— until the next time when we were called upon to gather them up again and feed them another wonderfully produced training program.We got away with this for a while, but at some point the learning landscape began changing and didn’t stop. The pace of this change has continued to increase in speed. It has also become turbulent and unpredictable.

The children in our family have grown up during this accelerating environmental churn. They span Generation X and Generation Y (the Millennials). These generations are emerging as learners equal to these times. For the most part, they are aggressive, self-directed, rapid, adaptive, and collaborative learners. Certainly no one is going to herd them into classrooms, close the gate, and force-feed them a traditional course – at least not for any sustained period of time. Trying to do this would be like trying to herd cats. And there’s a high probability that those who cling to the old ways of training will, at some point, get scratched (see : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWymXNPaU7g ).

There is a “New Normal” that Calls for a New Way
In the visionary words of Yoggi Bera, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” There most certainly is a “New Normal” where the environment in which we work is in a state of accelerating churn. There will be no return to the calm, predictable past. The realities of this New Normal compel us to alter how we profess learning. We can’t cling to old paradigms. I’m not suggesting we cast them completely aside or even “shift” them. Instead, we need to create new paradigms that fully fit this “New Normal” and at the same time provide bridges from the old paradigms for those who need or want to walk them.

Perhaps another farm insight could help illustrate what I mean by a “paradigm bridge.” One of my jobs, as a young boy, was to teach new calves how to drink milk from a bucket. This was not a natural thing for any calf to do. Their nature and experience was to seek milk from an upward source. I used a paradigm bridge to help calves embrace a completely new paradigm (i.e., drinking from a bucket.) I would put three milk-soaked fingers into the mouth of a calf and gradually nudge its nose downward toward the bucket. The calf would often resist, but I would bring the bucket up as far as I could, and with handfuls of milk channeling through my fingers into the mouth of the calf finally get the nose down and into the bucket of milk. By doing this, several times, over a short amount of time every calf completely change its inherent paradigm—how it drinks milk.Now, the New Normal generation of learners probably isn’t in need of paradigm bridges. They are the ones defining the new paradigms needed for these times. They’re embracing and pushing the evolution of Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies to facilitate the immediate collaborative resolution of their learning needs and wants. Those of us outside this aggressive, self-directed, rapid, adaptive, and collaborative approach may need a bit of help across the bridge into this “New Normal” way of learning with its ever fluent supporting technologies.

So Here’s the More Compelling Reason
The virtual classroom can provide a crucial paradigm bridge for our time to help facilitate the journey into the mindset of a rapid, adaptive, collaborative, self-directed learner – a learner who can learn at or above the speed of change. Recently while speaking with a group of learners about the New Normal, one of them said, “I’m a Gen Y in a Baby Boomer’s body.” No matter the generation, the reality of our times compels us to this new mindset. Eric Hoffer pegged it right:In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

It is in the virtual classroom where trainers can help learners bridge their informal and formal learning efforts. Here trainers can help build meaningful bridges to unleash the full potential of social networking. Here they can orchestrate a total Learning Ecosystem™ to sustain agressive learners at all five moments of learning need. Here, regardless of anyone’s generational genesis, trainers can help them cultivate the capacity they need to learn, unlearn, and relearn in the New Normal.

A Caution: Calling it VILT Doesn’t Mean it's Effective VILT
For more than 10 years, Bob and I have developed and proven in our client work an approach to Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) where learners achieve outcomes that actually far surpasses traditional face-to-face training. We employ an approach we call GEAR. It is a blended “Spaced Learning” approach where learning is spread out over time. This allows participants to learn and immediately apply what they learn in their professional lives.This approach is different from the majority of live, web delivered classes offered in organizations today where learners merely meet online and that’s it. In the GEAR model, “Gathering online” is only part of the learning journey. Following every session participants “Expand” upon and personalize their understanding of what they have learned. They take steps to “Apply” what they have learned into their work life. They also report on their efforts and “Receive direct feedback.” This feedback is where virtual trainers deliver their greatest value. It is the key to accelerated learning.True VILT requires greater instructional rigor in its development and delivery than what has typically been expended in the development of traditional “Instructor Led Training” (ILT). This isn’t to say that the same rigor isn’t called for, but the lack of instructional rigor can be more readily masked and at times compensated for in the traditional ILT classroom.The bottom-line? Just because someone claims that training will take place in the virtual classroom, This may or may not be the case. Organizations can achieve a consistent high-yield “Return on Instruction” (ROi) in their VILT. This return can potentially exceed traditional ILT but it requires an instructionally sound, blended spaced-learning approach. The GEAR model provides a practical framework for accomplishing this.

The Traditional Classroom Doesn’t Have to Die—It Just Needs to Change
None of this suggests that traditional training has to disappear. The personal connection that can take place when people gather in person is unmatched. Unfortunately, we too often misappropriate learning time spent in traditional classrooms with low level learning that could readily be accomplished in other, more efficient ways. This is a subject that merits discussion beyond this article. A crucial question for any learning leader to ask is “What is it that we can only accomplish by physically gathering together to learn?” The answer to this question may very well lead us to places we have not yet gone. But this is certain, it will be a better place for the organizations and the people we serve.

The Personal Rewards of Training in the Virtual Classroom

Bob and I just finished teaching our new course: High Yield Training in the Virtual Classroom. During this virtual Instructor led training (VILT) course we employed our GEAR design and development process. For those readers, not aware of the GEAR methodology, here’s a brief description:

The GEAR™ model consists of a spaced learning that includes a series of virtual training/coaching cycles that allow participants to apply immediately what they learn to their own work requirements.

When most people gather virtually, they merely meet online and then disperse. That’s it. With the GEAR training/coaching model, gathering online is only part of the learning journey. Following every session, participants expand and personalize their understanding of what they have learned and then take steps to apply concepts and tools into their work streams. The final step in the GEAR cycle is to report progress and receive personalized feedback from the trainer and peer participants. (For more detailed information about this model view the following recording: https://admin.na4.acrobat.com/_a826380069/p22534461/

Bob and I have marveled at what we experienced, as trainers, during this virtual course approach. We have previously participated in the development of courses using our GEAR model and observed remarkable results in learning outcomes for our clients including the exhilaration it was for the trainers. But this was the first time we have developed and delivered a course of our own employing GEAR.The result? In our combined experience of training adults, we have not experienced greater personal satisfaction as trainers—ever! This wasn’t just “High Yield Training” for those who participated as learners, it was “High Yield training” for us as trainers. We finally spent most of our training time doing what no other training delivery system can do as well. We orchestrated adaptive learning embedded directly in the work-stream where we were able to provide individual attention to students with tailored feedback – and it was GREAT!In addition, the lines between formal and informal learning blurred – as it should. We built a performance support broker that provided a bridge from the virtual classroom into the on-the-job independent learning process of participants.

Fundamental to the GEAR approach is intentional informal “Expand and Apply” learning assignments.Now, lest those who took the course and are now reading this blog wonder about these comments – we’re not saying that the course couldn’t have been better or that it won’t get better. It could and will. But, that’s the learner side of things. For a few of our learners, the transition from the traditional classroom to the virtual classroom was a bit difficult, because, frankly, we failed to help them reset their expectations from a traditional classroom mindset. The GEAR model requires learners to engage and own their own learning journey and it is impossible for any learner to hide from it.What we found as trainers is that we knew where everyone was at every point of their learning journey to competence with greater precision than we have ever known during traditional ILT.For the majority of participants, who jumped in and embraced the GEAR learning approach, it was transformational. Here are a few excerpts from learner comments to illustrate:

“Thank you so much for this excellent opportunity for growth. This was a fantastic program that has taken my teaching to a whole new level.”

“The VILT workshop taught me how to properly use technology to actively engage learners in a virtual learning environment. The opportunity to use the virtual classroom first hand, from my own office, gave me a true appreciation for the effectiveness of the VILT techniques. The month of the workshop flew by, and by the end I had the knowledge, resources and tools I needed to move my learning project forward, by leaps and bounds.”

“It was great to see a Virtual Classroom firsthand., This class not only helps you design for Virtual Classroom; it helped me improve my design process for all delivery methods.”

“The GEAR model provides us with a practical, proven approach to designing and delivering training that helps our learners go from just 'knowing' to 'doing.' In fact, the principles we learned in the Virtual Classroom training will make all of our instructor-led trainings better!”

From these comments you can see that participants emerged from their learning experience with an understanding of how to improve training in the traditional classroom setting as well. But what we want to celebrate with you in this blog article is the absolutely rewarding experience training in the virtual classroom can be for trainers. This course wasn’t a webcast. It was rigorous training that pushed learners to work to learn. And they worked, they learned, and they performed!

Certainly the solid performance outcomes from this kind of training is rewarding to us. But our journey through the teaching process was even more rewarding. We worked more closely with our learners than ever before. They made greater progress in their learning than we have ever seen in traditional Instructor Led Training. We were able to coach learners through the fundamental learning moment of need—the moment of Apply. We were able to draw upon our experience to provide feedback that connected to improvements in the learner’s skill-sets, thereby manifesting the benefits of that feedback in the quality of participants on-the-job work projects.We found exhilaration and intrinsic reward every step of the way. Training adults was the best it has ever been.