COVID has fundamentally changed how knowledge workers do their jobs in almost every way. For those folks lucky enough to figure within the knowledge sector, there are major adaptations by every organization to still deliver products and services with teams who are all performing from home.
Meetings are replaced by Zoom. Chatting within the kitchen has been replaced by Slack or Microsoft Teams channels. After work drinks are replaced with video happy hours.
Ongoing training and development is not any exception.
Just like schools and universities are deciding the remote classroom, HR, training, and enablement teams are deciding the way to take their in-person learning to remote.
In this post, we’re going to cover what remote learning is and a 6-step process you’ll use to implement it in your own organization.
What is Remote Learning
At its most elementary , remote learning is once you teach your staff new things via a foreign connection. Remote learning can are available tons of various flavours counting on how robust or complex your system is.
The most common use cases for remote learning are:
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To communicate process, procedure, or policy changes to a corporation
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Ensure that staff are compliant with regulatory requirements
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Career development
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Technical certifications
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Ongoing product education
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Optional courses for private / professional improvement
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Major remote learning platforms are generally divided into two categories.
Some remote learning platforms provide content for you during a buffet-style course selection. Salesforce Trailhead and LinkedIn Learning are two examples.
Others offer you all the tools to create your own courses. This includes tools like Moodle and Advantage CSP (we’re getting to mostly specialise in the second type).
Remote Learning 101: Lift-and-Shift Remote Learning
Remote learning 101 is what tons of organizations turned to when the pandemic started. They took whatever training they absolutely had to deliver and ported it into Zoom sessions. Same material experts (SMEs) and effectively an equivalent delivery mechanism.
While this solved the matter within the short term, it quickly became obvious this wasn’t getting to be a sustainable solution long-term, if for no other reason than 8-hour Zoom meetings are unbearably boring.
Remote Learning 201: Dedicated Courses for Specific Problems
This is where most organizations try to urge immediately. They’re trying to find how to deliver learning and training online and are looking to try to do it in a more engaging way that really takes advantage of the fact we’re all remote.
Often, this is often when a learning tech stack becomes more relevant.
At this stage, remote learning is typically a mixture of live Zoom calls with SMEs, pre-recorded video content, written content, and a few kinds of course knowledge check, sort of a quiz.
Depending on the sophistication of the technology delivering all the above, you’ll include things like drag and drop word associations or matching games, etc… to enhance retention.
Remote Learning 301: Remote Learning Done Right
This is where remote educators should aspire to be, and is where organizations like Salesforce, Google, and HubSpot have already gotten to and truly turned their remote learning on their customers.
Remote learning done right doesn’t just educate and certify your internal team members. It also loops in your broader ecosystem of consumers , community members, and participants and gamifies the experience to encourage further education and development.
Few organizations will get to the present level, but if you do, you build not only a well-informed team and ecosystem, but you really build out your own brand equity and value across all of your partners.
How to Implement Remote Learning
Now that we all know what remote learning is, let’s probe how you really roll in the hay.
For now, we’re getting to assume you’ve achieved 101 status. If you haven’t, then you’ll likely hack it alongside your existing remote working tech stack and a couple of calendar invites. Here’s how you’re taking it to a subsequent level.
1. Set your objective
First off, what are you trying to realize together with your remote education? This may drive the remainder of your strategy, so it’s important to be crystal clear about what success seems like.
For some, this may be an easy regulatory requirement. For businesses, it’s often about increasing top-line revenue by making your sales team better.
Confirming your objective is obvious and well-understood by the remainder of the team you’re getting to attempt to remotely teach.
2. Assemble your content
Once you’ve got your goal, you would like to assemble your content. It doesn’t need to be during a final form or anything at this stage — that comes next.
Right now, just find out what content you would like to deliver. Then, evaluate your existing content. What are often repurposed? What does one get to build from scratch?
For example, for instance you were building a course to show people a few specific products, and you had a technical webinar of that product. you would possibly take that and see that it says everything you would like — just within the wrong format. That’s fine! you’ll slice it into smaller videos later. For now, just see what you’ve got and what you would like to edit / reassemble / build.
At this stage, you have to think through who’s getting to help with any content you don’t have.
3. Build your course
Now it’s time to create your remote learning course.
First, choose your distribution tool. which will offer you a thought of what the top product will appear as if also as how best to connect the content you’ve assembled.
Next, start adding within the content you’ve got. Attempt to misunderstand the formats, and make it as engaging as possible.
Finally, return to your content gaps and begin to create out the extra content you would like within the format that’s getting to work best for your course.
Couple of common pitfalls to avoid:
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Going too broad: you’re better to form two, hyper-targeted courses instead of one vague course.
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Adding in too much: if unsure , cut it out.
4. Release your course
Release day! Send your course to your constituents. Treat this as a launch, and check out and do whatever you’ll to urge people to be excited about it. An email blast to your learners may be a good start, but consider ways you’ll make it more fun to interact with on opening day (e.g. prizes for the primary one to finish it, etc… )
5. Validate your remote learning happened
Next, you would like to validate that your learning actually happened. Quizzes and certifications are the quality tools here. This is often also where gamification can be available , and therefore the more noise you create at the beginning, the simpler your validation and gamification are going to be.
Ideally, if you’ll get people to truly share the very fact they completed your courses, then you’ll start to create momentum and, eventually, build towards totally self-directed, evergreen learning.
6. Evaluate your outcome
The last step here is to gauge your outcome. Did your remote learning achieve the goal you designed? Did you certify the proper number of learners, or engage the proper number of employees, or achieve the revenue outcome you were looking for? confirm you revisit your original goals to urge an honest handle on what’s effective and what isn’t for your specific organization.
Wrap Up
Given our reality immediately, it’s safe to assume remote learning will be a neighborhood of our life for a short time .
And, unexpectedly, this is often an honest thing. Remote learning comes with plenty of perks over in-person learning, namely that it can happen anywhere, any time, asynchronously. And for growing organizations with distributed coworkers, that’s an enormous plus.
What’s more, remote learning is often scaled and transformed into a strong tool for constituency engagement, whether that’s users, customers, or partners.
The key’s building a course that works, with clean objectives, validated results, and outcomes that close the loop on the training experience.
