What ingredients do you need for great online support? Fundamentally, these three are enough: inform, inspire, and support. Instead of just offering an in-person training, your participants receive the perfect link between offline learning and online learning. It starts with a preparatory online learning phase before the in-person session. Afterwards, you provide sustainable transfer support. This combination offers a fantastic learning experience and is a recipe for success for your training participants.
Inform - Offer content that sticks
To ensure that the information you convey to your participants sticks, you should consider the following aspects:
You leverage the prior knowledge of the participants.
You use metacognitive questions for your learning material. Example questions include “How well informed are you on this topic?” or “Where do you see knowledge gaps?”.
You ensure that social learning takes place. For example, you encourage participants to form study groups or assign them the task of telling their friends or partners about the training topic. Social learning works well when the learner alternates between explaining a topic themselves and receiving explanations from others.
You break your content into small units and present the content repeatedly. This makes learning easier for your participants.
You offer varied training content with different levels of difficulty. This ensures that participants get the right mix of successful experiences and challenges during the training.
Employees in the company access the online support on their own devices. They are neither time nor location constrained in their learning planning. It doesn't matter whether your online content is learned on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer. If employees assess the training as meaningful and beneficial, self-directed employees will find the necessary time to learn.
Inspire - Address and motivate participants personally
Even if you are not present, you can still address your participants very personally - with video content. This is particularly important in the lead-up to your in-person session. Here, you can introduce yourself in a short video. This way, participants get to know you. At this point, you can also introduce the training process and program. This alleviates participants' uncertainty and piques their curiosity about your training. The closer you work with your client, the more likely you can bring the leaders on board, as the success of the training is significantly determined by the responsible leaders in the company. You provide your participants with the exercises and techniques, and the leaders give employees the chance to apply these techniques.
How can the leader understand what their employees are learning? For example, you can invite stakeholders (team leaders, managers, HR development staff) to your online support. This way, this group can quickly get an overview of your content, methods, and exercises. This can happen either during the sales phase or before the training begins. In both cases, you present not a concept or an idea, but a finished product. Support from the leadership level is important for the training transfer, as these individuals in the company decide on the conditions that enable (or prevent) group learning and informal learning.
Support - Stand by with advice and assistance
After your in-person session, you remain in contact with the training participants through online support. This sporadic yet long-term support is the best strategy for anchoring knowledge and accompanying behavioral changes. With small inquiries, you help participants check their knowledge level. Of course, you can conduct this with point values. On the other hand, you can also offer reflection questions for self-assessment. Since participants need to learn in a self-directed manner, it is better if they do not feel like they are being tested.
People tend to remember things that are repeatedly brought to mind. You can ensure content refreshment of the training topics with summaries or critical questions. This way, the learned content remains readily accessible and can be transferred to new situations.
Besides knowledge transfer, practicing and applying your techniques is the second aspect that is important in the transfer phase. With practice prompts and reflection questions, you can support the training participants. Participants who are intensive about their personal development will seek your advice and suggestions. You can assist the group of participants by encouraging interaction among the participants and letting each group member share their experiences.
If you want to develop an online support for your training, please send us a message. We are happy to assist you! ;)
