Many of the organisations we work with have an emphasis on knowledge delivery. Are you in charge of CPD training events, conferences, or webinars for your organisation? You need to ensure that your elearning training events are just as effective as those in-person.
After all, you do not want there to be a drop in knowledge retention.
But is elearning any substitute for learning in-person? Indeed, can elearning replace classroom learning?
We believe so. This article is all about how to ensure that your online learning events benefit your audiences just as much as, if not more than, your in-person conferences and workshops.
1. Allow For Microlearning
Online learning resources allow audiences to learn at their own pace. This makes them a much more digestible way of learning than having to attend a conference.
We recommend recording your webinars to a high quality. Alternatively, you could make your training materials available online in another format via elearning. This can allow your audiences to rewatch them, at any speed. Instead of attendees having to invest time into travelling to your event, and waiting in a hotel lobby for your training conference to start, they can work their way through your online elearning course immediately, whenever they have time.
A typical microlearning module can be completed in 5 minutes. This means that the 10 minutes your attendees spend queueing for your workshop, could instead be spend completing 2 elearning modules via microlearning.
Easily digestible videos of your webinars are much easier for people to glean information from, than unedited webinars or in-person events, as bite-sized content can increase information retention by 20%.
2. Vary Your Content
You may be used to training staff via in-person classes, lecture slides, and ebooks. However, this is not as effective as your knowledge dissemination strategy could be. Studies have shown that traditional methods such as written content are just not retained well by audiences – that is not your fault, or the fault of your audience. It is just human nature.
Fortunately, elearning resources allow you to input multimedia content that will statistically help your staff to learn and develop more effectively. For instance, they could incorporate demonstrative videos, easily digestible infographics, or even podcast-style soundbites so that your audience can listen to the information when they do not have the attention span at the time to read and digest the content fully.
We encourage that you take advantage of all of these possibilities by recording videos for your staff/members to learn from, as this is the form of media that produces better learning.
3. Measure Audience Response
With elearning online courses, it is easy to find out whether your learners are learning effectively, via compulsory surveys at the end of modules or online metrics to see which modules take longer to complete or are not fully viewed to the end.
You can then look through these metrics on online reports and spreadsheets, and very quickly and easily summarise which modules were delivered well, and which ones your audiences need further support with.
Compare that to in-person seminars, where you can pass around a sheet of paper to ask people what they thought of the training, but responses are not guaranteed and they might be too brief to be useful.
This is why having a training library of elearning content, and monitoring reception to them online, is essential in effectively facilitating the CPD of your organisation’s members, or staff.
4. Make it as Easy as Possible to Navigate
If you are making knowledge content available online for people to learn from, that is because you want to make it accessible, and convenient. Don’t undo that by having too many interactive elements or navigation options, or by having an inconsistent system of titling videos/modules.
Every video and text resource in your elearning library should make it as clear as possible to which module they belong, and in what order certain CPD modules should be completed.
One way to see if this is the case for your elearning library, is to get someone to test it, by looking through the modules and attempting to complete them in the correct order. If there is any confusion whatsoever, your learners will be confused too, so it is time to re-jig your content.
5. Make Use of the Knowledge Events You Have Already Held
One benefit of elearning is that it enables people to learn and develop without having to attend your conferences or seminars in person. However, that does not mean that they should be getting an inferior experience to those people that have attended your events.
Getting your seminars/webinars/conferences recorded and edited is a great time-efficient and cost-effective way of ensuring that you, and your learners, can benefit from the knowledge and insight gained from your training events long after they have taken place.
So, now you know…
We hope that our tips were helpful in helping you to curate a knowledge dissemination strategy for your organisation.
Do you have an upcoming knowledge event (e.g. a seminar or workshop) that you want to be recorded to use in a knowledge library? Get in touch with CPDonline by emailing us. We record video content for professional associations to use as their very own bespoke elearning program.
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