The GEAR instructional design, development, and delivery model for Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT) has, as a core component, Expand assignments that are completed by learners following a virtual training session. Expand assignments provide learners opportunities to increase, tailor, or reinforce the understanding and skill-set they were taught during the virtual Gather session. These assignments can directly address five fundamental realities that we have struggled to resolve adequately in the traditional classroom
Here are those realities along with some thoughts on how Expand assignments help address them.
Reality 1: Ownership is 9/10ths of the Law for Learning Transfer
In reality, the true measure of our value to the organizations we serve is determined at the moment of Apply—when the learner is called to perform in the real world. Everything we design, build, and implement must, at some point translate into meaningful application by learners. It is this reality that has pushed Bob and me to pursue practices in the area of Performer Support where the focus is directly on helping learners transfer what they have learned to the moment of Apply.
Expand assignments can also play a vital role in helping learners successfully cross the learning transfer bridge. Here’s how. When learners personalize what they are learning and translate what they have learned to their individual circumstances, they take their beginning steps on the transfer bridge. When they feel this ownership they are much more likely to choose to use the performance support tools we develop. They will make the effort to modify how they have performed in the past to include what they have learned. They will store what they learn more readily into their long-term memory and retrieve what they have learned, when it is needed, more effectively. Personal ownership of what learners learn is 9/10ths of the law when it comes to learning transfer.
Expand assignments, if designed properly, can help make this happen. Here are some design guidelines:
- Where, possible, include the assignment to teach what learners have learned to someone else. There is no more powerful way to help someone own what they have learned than to have them prepare for and then teach what they have learned to someone else. Just make sure that there is meaningful content and helpful skills to teach to someone else. If it is ever perceived as merely a “make-work” assignment it will have little to no impact.
- Provide some optional expand opportunities that allow learners, who have interest, to take them on. The act of choice has a transforming impact on learners. Since they have chosen to learn something because they have interest in learning it, they take ownership. The secret here is to provide them a compelling case to “take it on.”
- Attend to reality number 2 (below.) The more tailored the assignment the higher the probability that learners will own their journey across a much shorter transfer bridge.
One of the great challenges of classroom training is that learners show-up with unique backgrounds and differing levels of understanding and skill sets. This challenge is compounded by the fact that these learner’s “real world” environments vary. Even two people, who share the same job role and work side-by-side, actually work in different worlds due to nuances of personality and the nature of differing perceptions. All these differences contribute to the ever-present challenge of adapting synchronous instruction to accommodate the unique circumstances learners face in their almost singular worlds of application.
Most trainers who attempt to tailor learning during an actual training class find it tough and at some point surrender, at least partially, to the pressures of other realities. For example, in the flow of synchronous teaching, if the trainer attempts to address a unique challenge facing one student, what are the other students doing? Too often, they are sitting on their hands waiting for the instructor to get back to their learning needs and interests. This tailoring challenge is much greater in the virtual classroom. Focus in on one student there and and the rest of the class will check out mentally and start checking email. Have you ever been in a class where the unique needs of an assertive student has brought learning to a screeching halt for the rest of the class? The bottom line: tailoring in the midst of synchronous training is tough.
There are certainly ways around this. In the virtual classroom, Expand assignments provide one of those ways. These assignments provide learners the opportunity, following a Gather session, to adapt what they have learned to their specific world of application as they perceive it to be and according to its current realities. Feedback is vital here. You can add to Expand assignments questions that encourage learners to identify unique challenges they face regarding what they have learned with the assignment to propose potential solutions. Learners then submit this as part of their reporting so that they can “Receive tailored feedback” (the R part of GEAR.)
In addition, whenever you can anticipate learning requirements that are unique to a sub-audience in a course, Expand activities can be helpful. For example, one of our client colleagues determined that she wanted to train peer coaches during the same class as the people they would be coaching on-the-job. She had two overlapping training needs with significant tailoring requirements: training new hires and training their coaches in how to coach them. Here’s how she did it.
Both the new hires and the coaches participated in the same Gather sessions. The coaches were charged to learn what the new hires needed to know and do. Then during the Expand activities, the coaches worked on different Expand assignments to help them learn how to be better coaches while the new hires took on Expand options that helped them learn more about what they had been taught during the Gather session and in the process personalize it to their own specific circumstances.
Obviously Expand assignments don’t play a singular role in addressing the challenges of tailoring. Solid Apply activities also play a vital role. But don’t underestimate what Expand assignments that are designed to address this reality can do – they can do a lot.
Reality 3: Real Learning Requires Chewing
When I was in graduate school I conducted a study where we addressed the principle of “time on task” with first grade children learning to read. We attempted to collapse the normal distribution of reading failure by adapting the teaching methodology to allow learners to take the time they needed to chew on what they were taught. We acknowledged the reality that some children needed more time to master reading skills than others. At the conclusion of the study we had every child in every classroom reading at their reading grade level or above.
A newspaper reporter interviewed me about this study and I explained that we had primarily provided children the “time on task” they needed . In her article, she summarized our study’s conclusion by stating that we had proven that “children who attend school will learn more than those who don’t attend.” Clearly I should have provided her more time on her task of understanding what we were doing.
Have you ever taken a class where your attention faded or where you experienced learning fatigue to the point that you just stopped learning? Expand activities can provide opportunity for the ongoing “chewing” of what was presented, discussed, and practiced during a Gather session. This allows those who may have “checked out” mentally during the Gather session an opportunity to step back into that learning and chew on it some more until they’ve got it.
The GEAR model allows you to create opportunities for learners to continue their learning beyond the Gather session. In practice, we generally provide access to a recording of the Gather session so that learners can review as needed. It is often the case that when learners begin their Apply assignments, they find places where they thought they understood but they didn’t. It’s helpful, at that moment, to have access to the Gather recording.
We also produce recordings of “deeper dives” where we provided a more detailed discussion of a specific topic or skill as an Expand assignment to view and then do something with it. Got the idea? GEAR blends synchronous with asynchronous modalities and wraps feedback around it all. The result: learning actually survives the classroom. Why, because learners are able to “chew at their own pace.”
Reality 4: Lasting Learning Requires Chewing Over Time
One of the fundamental indictments of traditional classroom training is the immediate loss of learning that takes place. It is even worse in the virtual world where “webinars” are, for the most part, rapid-fire content dumps. Real learning really does require “chewing.” And lasting learning requires chewing over time. This is where the virtual classroom excels the traditional classroom. The nature of the VC environment pushes us to break learning up into multiple shorter Gather sessions. This opens the door for us to spread those sessions out over time. Here’s why that’s helpful. Do you remember “cramming” for tests? Not much learning survives when it’s “crammed.” The encoding of knowledge and skills into long-term memory sufficient to allow efficient retrieval (with or without the help of job-aids), requires spaced learning. Even if you successfully “cram” it all into long-term memory all at once, the retrieval of what you have “crammed in” is often messy when it comes to remembering.
My first semester at a university included an asynchronous elearning course. It was a math course and I loved the self-paced option. We weren’t allowed to move to the next module without achieving over 90 percent on each unit test. . I pushed through it all in record time and then focused on other classes and extracurricular activities. I wasn’t alone in this. All the members of my class did the same. We loved it. When we took the final exam, two and a half months after I had completed all the learning modules I couldn’t remember much of what I thought I had learned. Neither did other members of the class. We should have “crammed” for that exam or at least reviewed. But that was the great problem—the designers of the courseware hadn’t incorporated review into their instructional methodology. They had designed and developed stellar modules. But when we moved to module 2 we left module 1 behind never to return to those concepts and practices. The same held true through the rest of the course. Years later, in graduate school, I learned about the principle of “integrated review.” This is an instructional ap
proach where learners integrate newly learned skills and concepts with previously learned skills and concepts. This kind of review over time cultivates lasting competency.My point? In the VILT world, Expand assignments can provide this vital learning function – the integration of previously learned knowledge and skills with newly acquired learnings. By spreading this out over time learners solidify, integrate, and extend their skillsets. The result: learning that lasts.
Reality 5: Time is a Lousy Taskmaster
As a trainer, have you ever set a discussion timeline and then run behind schedule because you spent more time in an area than you had planned. Have you ever hesitated to share an example, or cut a discussion short, or opted out of a practice exercise so that you could get back on schedule? Have you ever completed teaching a course without getting to everything you needed to get to? Time is such a lousy taskmaster, isn’t it? When learning is governed primarily by the clock learning can often suffer. So, how do we break free from this challenge. Easy! The solution is found in Expand assignments. In the GEAR virtual training process, the Gather part of the virtual course (VC) can be designed to be modular. Each discussion can be designed so that it can be turned into a Expand activity, on the fly, if needed. This allows the virtual trainer to spend the time needed on each discussion area knowing that if she/he runs out of time during the Gather session, the remaining discussion areas can be pushed to Expand assignments where the learner can receive meaningful feedback. This lifts the burden of time-governed learning and removes the pressure to “cover it all.” It allows an instructor to focus on what matters most and still provide learners the opportunity to continue their learning, at their own pace, through the entire learning plan.
Bob and I have written earlier regarding how enjoyable it is to train in the virtual classroom. Many of the instructional frustrations we have experienced in the traditional classroom are tied to the five realities described above. And the GEAR model for virtual instruction resolves much of that frustration. In the GEAR model, the Expand assignments play a vital part in it all. The objective of this blog article is to provide you some help in designing Expand assignments that will prove helpful to you.
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