Pure face-to-face training is often rigid and limited in its possibilities. With blended learning, you supplement the face-to-face events with online support, bringing flexibility to your training. Find out in the article how not only you as a trainer or coach benefit from this, but especially your participants and your client!

Blended Learning means flexibility at all levels

E-learning has some advantages over traditional face-to-face learning – and vice versa. More and more trainers and companies do not want to choose between both forms of learning and opt for the symbiosis of both methods: They create a blended learning. The mixture in which online content and offline meetings occur depends on the specific situation.

Through the integration of online and face-to-face, a new form of flexible learning emerges for all involved:

This ‘hybrid learning arrangement’ combines the effectiveness and flexibility of e-learning with the social aspects of tandem and group learning (…) in seminars or workshops.
From: J. Erpendeck and W. Sauter: Competence Development on the Net – New Blended Learning with Web 2.0 (2007)

The flexibility in blended learning is evident at various levels of further education. I will present to you in the following paragraphs what advantages you as a trainer or coach, your participants, and your client can derive from it.

Seven strong advantages of blended learning for trainers:

• You gain flexibility

• You gain a unique selling point

• You gain a new source of income

• You gain new customer groups

• You gain measurability

• You gain reusability

• You gain media diversity

Maximum scope for action for trainers

The start with blended learning is often associated with a certain effort and an investment of time and money: After all, you are starting with a new training model and putting your energy into a method that is still unfamiliar to you. However, once the beginning is made, many trainers and coaches experience a whole new way of course management.

Flexible transition from face-to-face content to online support

For example, trainer Normen Ulbrich (im-nu.com) reports that blended learning is a tool that gives him tremendous flexibility and freedom:

In tightly scheduled face-to-face events, it often happens that you cannot discuss content anymore, for example, to allow for an intense discussion. As a blended trainer, you are relaxed: You simply convey this content in the online course! Upload a text or a video and briefly explain to your participant what it is about. Connect the new learning unit with a call to action and you have even gained something instead of losing content!

Flexible timing in the e-learning component

You can set up your online support weeks or months in advance. However, that does not mean that all content and their temporal sequences are set in stone. Many trainers appreciate their own flexibility in course creation and outline a rough model of the planned online course early on. However, you likely find that over time you discover new content and develop new ideas. Thus, you can gradually 'feed' your e-learning and make it ever more substantial.

Once the blended learning has begun, you act like a director or conductor: You keep an overview and can quickly and flexibly intervene if, for example, a topic proves to be particularly important for a specific learning group.

With the software from blink.it, it is particularly easy for you to make changes: Simply change the timing of a learning unit's release, and your participants will receive an impulse later (or earlier) than originally planned. This takes you only two minutes, and you are always closely monitoring your participants' learning progress. Thus, your online training is tailored to the needs of the group at all times!

Flexible Learning Design for Participants

Your participant is the most important person in blended learning: Their learning success is the goal of your client and thus also your own. In blended learning, they are clearly the focus: Thanks to the e-learning component, they can organize their time flexibly and adapt it to their regular working hours.

On the website e-teaching.org of the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media, the authors state two advantages from the learner's perspective in blended learning:

From the students' perspective, the advantages of a blended learning arrangement can be divided into two categories: flexibility and learning experience. Students appreciate the virtual learning components for the opportunity to determine the place and time of their learning themselves. Learning from home is particularly advantageous.
Source: https://www.e-teaching.org/lehrszenarien/blended%5Flearning

These advantages apply to working professionals just as much as to students: In the online course, learners mainly decide for themselves about:

• the time: Usually, the course leader only provides a rough orientation for the exercises and learning impulses, for example, for the next two weeks.

• the place: Whether on the go by train, at home in the garden, or at their own workplace – in blended learning, the learner decides about the location of the online training.

• the pace: Each participant decides for themselves whether to do an exercise multiple times or even skip it.

• the medium: In flexible blended learning, the learner is also independent of the device choice and can perform exercises from a smartphone as well as from a tablet or PC.

This flexibility, of course, only applies to the e-learning component of blended learning. However, face-to-face events are important to motivate learners, establish a personal connection, and prepare them for online support.

Bonus: Training in Training through High Flexibility

Another aspect and advantage of blended learning for your participant: For some learners, the high degree of self-responsibility is unfamiliar and new. Thus, blended learning is not only targeted for your training topic but also additionally promotes your participant's soft skills: You strengthen independence, time management, and digital competencies with blended learning or e-learning.

Your Client as a Flexible Participant in Blended Learning

Of course – if the employee benefits from blended learning, this automatically benefits your client as well. However, there are at least two other valuable advantages of blended learning for the associated company and the personnel and management level.

Use these advantages as arguments to sell your blended learning:

1. Argument: Flexible Topic Adjustment

Through blended learning, further education is temporally extended. Thus, your training changes from a one-day input to a multi-week or even multi-month support in everyday work.

This not only increases the transfer performance of participants but also the chance to integrate topics that arise unexpectedly into further education. If there is, for instance, a communication difficulty between employees, managers can discuss possible solutions for conflict resolution in the team in blended learning and find solutions with experts.

2. Argument: The Boss is on Board

Secondly, your client gains new opportunities for participation in blended learning. Personnel developers or other individuals in the company who are very interested in further education but could not actively participate due to time constraints suddenly gain concrete insights. Tell your client in the sales conversation that you will invite them to the online course just like all participants, and that they can flexibly decide whether and to what extent they want to engage with your content and the participants' discussions.

With this argument, you dissolve the concern of many clients who fear not to see real results from the further education: With blended learning, they not only receive a digital evaluation of the course results but can also participate flexibly.

The boss is on board! With blended learning, supervisors and personnel developers can flexibly decide to what extent they themselves want to participate in the online course or observe the learning progress of the participants.

By the way: The method of actively involving participants' managers in blended learning can also be found on card 8 of our rocket pack. The rocket pack is an internally developed card game for trainers and coaches that shows 40 proven methods for e-learning and blended learning across 40 cards. Numerous trainers are already successfully using it and draw inspiration from the accompanying online material for their own courses.

Learn more about the rocket pack here: www.blink.it/rocketpack!