Drowning in Digital Learning

...but life guards are on duty

We've all read it: COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation of learning. A lot. What was planned to take a few years, has now miraculously been done in a few weeks. And we can learn two things from that: your original plans were too safe, and now you should start doing it right.

The first is that the original plans were probably far too much on the safe side. In a time of minimal viable products and services, of a willingness to fail: what stopped you from getting a few prototypes out earlier? Surely there are some crazy ones out there in your organization who were more than willing to try something out.

The second one is that, now that you've got your initial learning out there, now it's time to do it right. For the sake of a good debate I'm challenging you to prove me wrong when I say that the vast majority of this new virtual learning is pretty much the same way the original classroom course was, but now using Zoom or Teams. And now that we've been doing this for a while, digital fatigue starts setting in. Just search the Internet with "covid virtual fatigue", and you will find articles like these from the World Economic Forum or National Geographic.

To name a few reasons: we miss non-verbal communication, we miss informal channels that naturally exist during physical meetings over coffee and breaks. And we find it hard to be behind a screen the whole time.

The twilight zone emerges

We now find ourselves in a strange in-between period. We've made our first adjustments to cope with going virtual, so that is behind us. But it will be some time before we can fully go back to social proximity. So we're entering into a sort of twilight zone where we cannot just continue to work with the quick patches we applied, but it's also too early to design for the New Normal.

So what should we do in the mean time?

Five guidelines

For me the solution is not the use of a single tool, but to start applying good principles of learning design. Look at what you have, and what you have learned that works in learning. I will give you a few that I find appealing, but again: comments are appreciated.

1. The platform is dead, long live the platform! Buy-in to a single technology is horrible. We may see it in an extreme form now that videoconferencing tools are overused, but the same holds true for any tool. If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will treat every problem like a nail. Surely everyone has other favorite tools to use - find a way to make them part of your learning journey. This will be tricky in corporate environments, where (cyber-)security considerations must be taken seriously. But surely there is a secure approved tool out there somewhere that you can use?
2. Enough already! Design sessions to be no longer than 45 minutes, including 15 minutes for Q&A and overrun. That means that if you run it well, you could be done in 30. A lot of what's covered in your session is probably available as a TED talk or YouTube video anyway. And if there isn't... what's keeping you? Everything else should be done offline. Either individually, or in small subgroups. And please don't use a tool for break-out sessions unless you absolutely have too. You will either be messing with the technology yourself, or just playing helpdesk for your students. Let them do it offline. You can always reconvene again later that day.
3. Let it go! Perhaps you're over-organizing? Over-controlling? The hardest thing a trainer needs to learn is that participants do not learn from us. They learn from thinking, talking and applying. So perhaps you shouldn't control the learning journey so much, and leave people to their own devices to get the job done. Of course you should always have a minimum amount of scaffolding in place make sure you set people up for potential success. So good instructions, examples or hints & tips. But a bit of failure goes a long way.
4. Be there for us. At the same time, with less organizing, less scaffolding and shorter sessions you will have to be there more for your participants. Not during those sessions, but outside of them. And there is a perfect parallel with physical world training: you do a lot of coaching and coaxing outside your presentations anyway. You create a safe 1:1 environment with an individual to create a bond, find out how they're doing, what they're struggling with. And then help them. Why would that be any different in virtual learning, except that you don't have the luxury of just walking over any more. So make yourself available to be there for them. Let them know how to get in touch with you, and check up on them!
5. Meet. Accept that not everything is suitable for digital learning. Or not yet. And that you're doing your learners a disservice by insisting on that channel. For instance, the more personal learning becomes, the more likely that you have to be together. Same with skills that require physical or mechanical practice and exercise.

Always apply good learning design principles to your intermediate solutions. Start small, see what works and adjust. You may find that that the MVP's you're building that way today, will develop into sustainable new delivery models for your old learning interventions of the New Normal.

A new dawn awaits us.