Mar 13
What We’ve Learned About Training
While almost all of our training prior to March 2020 was in-person, we’ve gained a lot of experience in online training over the past 3 years. In the following post, I want to outline some of those lessons and what we’re doing to put them into practice going forward.
Online vs In-person Training
The mistake many people made (including sadly most public school districts) was to approach online training like in-person training. Too often, in-person lectures (which weren’t that interesting to begin with) were just delivered over video conference. Learners who might otherwise checkout for a short period of time in the classroom suddenly got lost entirely with all the distractions of their home environment.
At Datapolitan, we’ve learned in this experience that online learning needs to be highly engaging with clearly defined tasks and the opportunity to meaningfully interact with the instructors and fellow students. While this has been true for our in-person training, we definitely have had to ramp up the engagement and make the content more focused with what we deliver online.
Making Online Training Work
To make the virtual live online training experience as engaging as possible, we make heavy use of chat, polls, breakout rooms, whiteboards, and other collaboration tools. We share screens to share work and find ways to make connections between everyone involved. We make sure the technology doesn’t get in the way of the learning experience and ensure everyone feels supported on the learning journey.
Most importantly, we keep the sessions short. Two (2) hours is the maximum we will go in an online training. We might do multiple iterations of a 90-minute or 2-hour block of instruction, but not without healthy breaks to give people a chance to relax, take care of any needs, and recharge from Zoom fatigue.
The Value of Pre-Recorded Content
Prior to the pandemic, most people thought of online training as a series of pre-recorded videos with a few checks of knowledge slipped in at various points to ensure the learner was paying attention. While there is value to pre-recorded content, we believe completely pre-recorded learning material is insufficient for the work we are trying to do as the only means of gaining knowledge or developing mastery.
Pre-recorded videos, when kept highly focused and brief, can definitely help learners with content. They can also learn at their own pace and at a time that best suits their schedule. They can watch videos over and over again until they understand a concept or technique. They can also review the information they’ve learned at some later point, reinforcing content later in the learning journey.
This also allows us to offload content from the live sessions to pre-recorded sessions, making the live interactive sessions more focused on integrating ideas than discovering them. While doing is essential to knowing, giving learners the opportunity to gain initial familiarity on their own allows them to better formulate their ideas. This gives us a better platform to build on in our live sessions as each learner is (hopefully) already familiar with the content.
Our Training Model Going Forward
Datapolitan is in the midst of a renovation and we’re still working out exactly what our training model is going forward. We’re recording content for a video library of resources to provide a blended learning experience for both our in-person and online courses. We’re working with some early partners to deliver this content and will be releasing more information on this in the near future.
In the meantime, please watch our Eventbrite page for upcoming public classes and send us an email if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you achieve your goal of being a more data-driven organization.
