Take pictures of your flipcharts and send them to your participants after the training. But not by email, rather as part of an online course: Only in this way can you achieve real learning transfer. Check out a specific example now of how such a photo protocol works in the online course!
Info: Two years ago, my colleague Hans Peter Ludescher described in the blog how you can create a photo protocol quickly and easily. Today, I want to show you how to upload your photos in the online course for your participants.
Poor Learning Transfer: Sending Photo Protocols by Email
In a seminar or workshop, colorful notes and content often arise that you, as a trainer or coach, want to document. Whether for your own documentation, for future training, or as a reminder for your participants. For the latter, many trainers still send the protocols by email today.
Do you also use photo protocols to send to your participants? Then I ask you now: What goal do you want to achieve with this?
Experience shows that trainers send photo protocols to their participants in order for them to remember the seminar and internalize the content better in the long term. So it’s about learning transfer. Unfortunately, this is poor with the email method. There are several reasons for that:
Random Timing
Your participant cannot choose when they receive the email from you. It's quite possible that they don't have time to open your photo protocol at that exact moment—and later they may not think about it anymore.
Overused Medium
Most email inboxes are full of emails. Opening and reading becomes a daily burden. The danger: Your valuable photo protocol gets lost in a flood of other messages.
Poor Presentation
Multiple images are often sent as a .zip file. With some mail providers, you see a small preview image, while with others, the attachment gets lost even faster. Either way: Your participant has to search for, open, and ideally save the individual photos of your protocol somewhere. This is extremely cumbersome and deters them.
Note: Only Photograph Participants with Their Consent
At the latest since the implementation of the GDPR, you should only photograph your participants with their explicit permission. Therefore, when documenting your workshop or seminar, make sure to only capture the content, such as cards or flipcharts.
You can see that a photo protocol sent by email is unfortunately insufficient to increase learning transfer after the seminar. The Modern Alternative: Make your photographed content available via an online course!
Capturing Photo Protocol 4.0 in the Online Course
Invite your participants to an online course after the seminar—or ideally, even before! This way, you can share your photo protocol online and simultaneously allow space for comments, additions, and further discussions.
The disadvantages of photo protocols sent by email mentioned above become advantages in the online course:
Timing
In the online course, your participant can choose when they have a few minutes of time and peace to view the photo protocol.
Medium
Unlike email, in an online course, there are no private or professional messages distracting from your content. Of course, SPAM is not found here—only what matters: Your content for the seminar.
Presentation
You can remind your participants about the course by email—the content itself doesn’t have to be saved painstakingly. There are various online platforms offering you diverse options: For example, with the blink.it platform, the presentation is in tile format. In an overview, the participant sees all the content you have shared with them. A click on a tile suffices, and your participant can view your photo in a large format.
Example of Photo Protocol in the Online Course with the blink.it Platform
The most important thing: With a photo protocol through the online course, you have hardly more effort than via email—but a much higher learning transfer!
Online Course
Admin Demo for blink.it
Do you want to test for yourself how an online course for learning transfer with photo protocol works? Request your free demo now and let our blink.it expert show you how the platform works. Afterwards, you can calmly create content for some time and try out various functions!
Example: Sharing Photo Protocol in the Online Course
The image above shows you how a photo protocol made up of four photos can look in the online course. If you are working with the blink.it platform, you can create such a simple course in less than five minutes!
For creating the photo protocol in the blink.it online course, four steps are important:
Enter a title.
Upload the photo.
Add a call to action (can be the same for all photos).
Set the sharing settings.
Check out here in two short screencasts how I created the example course with blink.it. In the first video, you can see how I set up the four contents (“Blinks”) – that is, steps 1-3:
Now the course is already nearly finished. As you can see from the duration of the example video, creating the content took less than two minutes!
What’s still missing is the setting of the sharing options. Think about when you want your participants to see the content and when they should be reminded of it:
In the example, you can see that the sharing setting with the blink.it platform takes a maximum of two minutes.
Info: I created the two screencasts based on real examples from a workshop. Thanks to Normen Ulbrich for providing the exemplary photos for the course!
Convince yourself of how quickly and easily you can create a photo protocol of your seminar or workshop with blink.it:
Of course, you can use your new online course not only as a pure photo protocol. Similarly, create content quickly and easily, for example, to prepare for your seminar or workshop!
For more tips and information on how to use an online course as a supplement for your training, we have created 7 sales tips as a PDF for you.
This way, you will achieve real learning transfer with a simple photo protocol and a handful of other contents in the online course!
