The current crisis has led to an upsurge in trainers considering whether they can deliver effective training remotely.

Well, having spent a lot of time on this over the last couple of weeks, the good news is that I believe you can, provided you have the right systems to deliver your training, and you get the basics right. 

I’ll go further. I genuinely believe that, once you’ve tried delivering training remotely, a lot of you will realise that it can be surprisingly effective. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it will completely replace classroom training. But, for those of us who haven’t perhaps embraced remote delivery in the past, it will become another important string in our bows.

So, how can you deliver training remotely, and make it effective?

I think, based on my research and experience developing participative, experiential materials for this style of delivery, there are two fundamental elements that have to be considered. 

This week’s blog covers the first of these, ‘System’ and in next week’s I’ll look at ‘Method’.

System
Remote delivery can replicate a lot of what goes on in the classroom, but only if it provides you, the trainer, with the right features.

For me, the absolute minimum requirements for any type of remote training are:

• Video conferencing/discussion. 
• The ability to share screens.
• The ability to share files.
• Chat. 

But, in order to allow you to deliver truly participative, experiential and engaging learning remotely, I think you should also insist on these elements:

Polls and Quizzes
Polls and quizzes enable you to engage your participants and involve them in the learning in a new way. We’re using polls a lot in our remote delivery modules to really bring learning to life.
 
Break Out Rooms
Not available in a lot of systems, this really does make a huge difference to your ability to run training sessions as you would in the classroom. 

In light of my research, and on the basis of a fantastic recommendation, we’re now using Zoom for our own internal training. In last week’s session, I was able to:

• Introduce the learning session to the group.
• Break my team into two random groups assigned to different break out rooms to complete an activity together.
• Pop into each breakout room to see how they were doing.
• Bring them back into the main training room to share their findings.
• Run a group discussion to review the activity and the learning they gained from it.
• Run a follow up exercise based on a single-question poll that helped to reinforce the learning.
• Show them a slide to reinforce a key learning point. (I could just have easily shown them a video, or other image.)
• Agree follow up actions with the group.

Sounds a lot like a classroom session doesn’t it? And the feedback from the team was that it didn’t feel very different to that. Indeed, some mentioned that it didn’t really feel like they were in five different locations at all!

If you’d like some help getting your remote delivery off the ground, give us a call. We’re here to help you adapt to a changed environment. 

Until next time…

Rod Webb