Topic 5 How to set up and manage digital training interventions-basic steps
Digital technologies have the potential to improve education and training interventions, increasing its accessibility and quality, but for this to happen proper planning and instructional design play a key role. Evidence on the effects of digital technologies on learners’ academic performance, including the development of transversal competences (e.g. problem solving, creativity, etc.) and basic skills (e.g. reading, mathematics and science), is positive. Even though education and training systems are evolving and increasingly making use of digital technologies to stimulate innovation, there is limited evidence of the extent to which adult educators have made progress in adapting their leadership, culture and delivery models (Falck O., Mang C., Woessmann L., 2018 and Escueta et al., 2017).
Digital training interventions
Digital Training Interventions are aimed at delivering learner-centric experiences. Training interventions usually involve needs assessment, content design, and development (includes the presentation of content as well as learning activities), program implementation, and evaluation. Developing a digital training intervention program involves assessing the need, designing materials, choosing the most appropriate digital tools to achieve your aim and developing training presentations and exercises, implementing the program and evaluating the success of the program.
There are some steps you should follow to develop more successful Digital training interventions
- Capture
On average, learners take only 7 seconds to make a decision about your content. To avoid drop-offs and ensure successful eLearning, you need to capture your learner’s needs. It’s vital that you do this before anything else so you can put your learners at the center of your project.
The most effective digital learning begins with a clear objective, and the capture stage is where you develop this. It doesn’t need to take a long time. When we talk about learning we are also talking about changing people’s behaviours and habits. To be successful you need to get under the skin of who your audience is, what will really help them perform better, and what will engage them.
- Conceptualize
After you have a solid vision for your project, it is time to come up with a concept-led design. The Conceptualize stage involves figuring out how your design will help your eLearning achieve its objective.
At the heart of this stage lies the fact that you want your eLearning to succeed, along with the knowledge that it’s more time-effective to test ideas upfront, rather than being faced with a fully created and polished project that just doesn’t work.
To help develop your concept, you could bounce your ideas off somebody else, or create prototypes.
- Create
When you have a winning design concept in place, you’re ready to start creating. Again, you want to be efficient with your time, so this stage is all about having a process in place for developing high-quality content as quickly as possible.
Evaluate your current build process to learn where you can refine your efforts. Ask yourself 5 important questions:
- Do you understand your audience’s needs and how to meet them? If the answer is no, revisit the Capture stage
- Do you have a plan for design? If not, your Create stage is likely to be confusing and lengthy. Go back to the Conceptualize stage.
- Are you clear on the branding and visuals you will use?
- Do you often notice broken links, incorrect grammar and spelling, or other mistakes after your eLearning has gone live?
- Answering these key questions should highlight the areas in your build process that have room for improvement.
- Cultivate
Evaluating your learner’s needs in the Capture stage means that you’ve already taken an important step towards ensuring success for your digital learning. You can take this even further by using insight from data and analytics to refine your project.
The knowledge that you can gain from live trends can be the difference between your digital learning meeting its objective or failing to deliver. For example, if you know that learners are frequently dropping off during a particular topic, you can refine the content to improve learner retention.
Data should be used throughout your entire eLearning process.
What should I do before the digital training interventions?
Like a face-to-face lesson, an online lesson also requires a lot of preparation and planning before it takes place. You should set up your desk using a good microphone and a good webcam, check the WiFi connection and the light.
For convenience, before each lesson you could send the material you will use. During the lesson, check the attendance of the students and after a few minutes that you can use to break the ice, then start the lesson.
When you work as an online teacher, you have to keep in mind one important thing: the student tends to get distracted more easily, so you have to be able to capture all the moments of loss of attention and you have to make your activities as dynamic and interactive as possible. Furthermore, you must always be empathetic and create a peaceful and pleasant atmosphere in which the students are stimulating to learn. Also remember to take breaks if your class lasts longer than 90 minutes.
When working with single lessons that are not part of a “package”, it is always suggested to ask the students when to schedule the next meeting. Furthermore, regardless of the type of lesson, it is important to send additional study material, such as other exercises to be carried out, to put into practice what you have learned and to make people perceive the quality of your work.
If, on the other hand, after a defined number of lessons, you have foreseen some in-depth questions, quizzes or tests, a simple meeting platform is no longer enough. You need an e-learning platform. In this way you will have the possibility to integrate both webinar platforms and/or meeting platforms and an e-learning system to produce and deliver your online courses in a single safe and professional environment.
If you want to learn more about digital training interventions read the following:
E-learning methodologies A guide for designing and developing e-learning courses
Considerations in Online Course Design
Your task now is to take one lesson of a course you are giving or plan to give and redesign it so it can be delivered online. Read the questions and discuss the answers with your collegues to help you draft a winning eLearning strategy:
Define the purpose, scope, and goals of your eLearning intervention
– What do you want to achieve with this eLearning intervention, including the relevant learning goals broken down into manageable elements?
– What are your measurable objectives linked to these goals?
Understand your students and their readiness to take part in your eLearning intervention
– Who are your students and what is their experience with eLearning?
– What are they expecting from this module?
– What technical resources do they have available?
– What technical support is available to your students?
Review and adapt the content of your course
– What are the building blocks of the course in terms of materials, resources and activities?
– How can these building blocks be adapted for online delivery?
– Who will be responsible for this adaptation? Do you have the resources to implement it?
– Who else will be involved in this process?
– How will you facilitate teacher/student and student/student interaction?
Plan access and assessment
– How will students access the course building blocks?
– Are you planning to track student activities online and if yes, then how?
– How will you facilitate assessment of this module?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- PINTEREST page which provides a broad selection of infographics on the topic of eLearning design. Most come from commercial eLearning providers but many of the principles can be applied to online learning design of courses in higher education.
- The MOOC called “The Online Educator: People and Pedagogy”, focuses on eLearning courses design.
- The MOOC “Engaging Students in Active Learning” looks at the reality of the relationship between teacher and learner from different perspectives, where they fit learning objectives into each scenario to create an engaging and driven learning experience.
- The course “To Flip Or Not To Flip – Discover the flipped classroom methodology” explores the Flipped Classroom approach for teaching and learning.
- DigiNole – University Digital Library
- OER Commons – Public Digital Library
This topic’s aim was to provide an overview of the basic steps to be taken in consideration when dealing with the planning and implementation of digital training interventions. Suggestions, resources and questions to be answered were provided for a successful planning of an online intervention