Pivot, Pivot, Pirouette
The Training Doctor is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year!
We were founded in June of 1991, during a recession (the best time to start a business it turns out); and through the decades, as you might imagine, we’ve had to pivot a few times to keep up with industry changes and trends.
We thought we’d share a peek into our time capsule.
At our start, we weren’t even called The Training Doctor – at first we were named Business Visions Consultants or BVC for short (dreams of IBM dancing in our heads). Why did we change our name? You try to say either of those things (the full company name or the abbreviation) when answering the phone. They are both completely unintelligible.
PIVOT
Also at our start, we were focused on contract facilitation for various organizations in the Northeast such as school systems, insurance companies, casinos, and state agencies. After four years in business and one particularly grueling, year-long, facilitation gig teaching supervisory skills using a million-dollar curriculum our client had purchased from a well-known leadership development company who shall go unnamed because it was sooo b a d (suffice it to say, they are no longer in business), we commenced our FIRST PIVOT and decided that there were a lot of great facilitators around but NOT a lot of great training designers and we would be better suited to focusing solely on instructional design.
For the next 20 years our sole offering was to design custom curriculums for our clients and hand it back to them for delivery. This was typically because the work our clients did was either very technical or proprietary, and they needed something custom designed for them. Since our expertise is in how adults learn, and particularly how adults in the workplace learn (where behavior change is the expected outcome), we had the pleasure of working in all sorts of industries and for companies you have never heard of like a cheese processing plant in New Jersey, a startup medical company founded by one of the original founders of WebMD in Atlanta,
a 15-store kitchen wares retailer in Connecticut (think Williams Sonoma, but on a much smaller scale) that was doubling its number of retail outlets in one year, the precursor to VMware in Massachusetts, a twenty-year-old, UK-based, global insurance broker that had never had a training department before, and many, many more. If you are interested, you can go to our home page and see some of the logos of the more recognizable companies.
During this time we crisscrossed the US speaking at many industry conferences which were focused on training, adult learning, human resources, and organizational development, helping others to learn how to take knowledge from SME’s heads and turn it into a curriculum, how to design fair and legally valid tests administered post-training, and how to ensure you are designing a training program that actually gets at the root of a performance problem, not just a symptom. Additionally, we had two books published – how to be a successful one-person training department since many of our clients were just that, and how to design a blended learning approach to workplace training.
PIVOT
It was also during this time that we completed our SECOND PIVOT into Virtual Instructor Led Training, or vILT. While the focus on instructional design stayed true, the delivery mechanism changed. Throughout the nineties and first few years of this century the only option was classroom-based training. But with the advent of the internet and computers at every desk, and the development of WebEx (which was the front-runner in synchronously delivered training, followed by many others), we saw the potential for global companies to embrace the use of vILT to cut costs and still provide high-quality training in a “classroom” environment.
From about 2002 to 2015 The Training Doctor specialized in designing virtual instructor-led training curriculums for many Fortune 500 organizations that had global footprints. This became the expertise we were most known for since designing engaging, interactive, online learning to a group of people who are all sitting alone at their desks is no easy feat. Especially when the end goal is to get those people to change their behavior as a result of participating.
Virtual Instructor-Led Training is the format that pulled together all our history and skills: facilitation, design, adult learning theory + radio and television training (because as hard as it is to design for vILT, it’s even harder to be the facilitator).
As an aside, you might be interested in learning about the pivot we DIDN’T make - which was NOT giving the time of day to eLearning which was all the rage in the late nineties. eLearning – in our opinion – is not effective for learners or clients, for a number of reasons: it’s largely self-study and we know that most people are not self-directed… there is no one to ask questions of… back in the 90’s and early 2000’s it was very linear and real-life is not linear, so it wasn’t teaching “real world”… the completion rates are abysmal… adults are collaborative learners and there is no collaboration with a computer… the cost and time to “program” are astronomical… and the maintenance to ensure content is up-to-date can be cumbersome or neglected. vILT overcomes all of these faults, which is why we embraced this form of learning via computer.
PIROUETTE
Our last pivot was more of a pirouette which occurred in 2015. We now focus solely on the design of leadership development to help organizations to develop leadership pipelines and bring their future leaders “up” from within. Throughout our 15+ years of designing custom curriculums via vILT two topics were consistent: sales and leadership. And what we saw large, well monied, reputable organizations doing in the realm of leadership was wrong, completely wrong. And we were PART OF THE PROBLEM.
You cannot teach someone to be a coach in a 2-hour coaching course with a breakout for roleplay. You cannot teach someone to be emotionally intelligent in a class. It’s impossible to learn to manage stakeholders if people aren’t out in the organization interacting with their stakeholders learning what their values and needs are.
Yes, there is a time and place for classroom (or eLearning) – such as when learning facts, underlying rules, and how-to, but leadership is a behavior and changing people’s behavior is an experiential process done over time and approached in many ways.
Now, in our 30th year, we are committed to forestalling the leadership development crisis that companies have fallen victim to over the last few decades. Our exclusive focus (and passion) is helping small to medium-sized organizations to create a leadership pipeline by having a development strategy that starts when an employee walks in the door. Some of our unique techniques include experiential learning, job visitations, mixed cohorts of learners, and other proven development strategies that you won’t find in “off the shelf” leadership development or a one-and-done course.
If you think we can assist your organization – please give us a call or you can download an overview of our process here.
Interview with Darlene Christopher, author
the-successful-virtual-classroom-book-cover
The Successful Virtual Classroom by Darlene Christopher
What motivated you to write this book?
I think that delivering training via virtual classrooms offers so much potential to organizations in terms of the ability to scale the delivery of training to dispersed audiences. The books I found on virtual classroom training focused on the "what" of virtual classroom training but I felt there was more to be explored in terms of the "how" so I decided to write about it.
I also included a chapter focused on delivering virtual training to global audiences since globalization is a growing trend affecting many organizations, yet little has been written about it.
If you could distill your message down to just one - what would it be?
Delivering training programs in a virtual classroom requires adjustments in two key areas in order to engage a live online audience: content and facilitation. Adjusting your content and facilitation techniques takes some time, but in return it saves travel time and cost for both the enterprise and learner.
How can trainers use this book to assist them in the work that they do?
The goal of this book is to provide facilitators and other training professionals with the tools and techniques to confidently design and facilitate engaging virtual programs. A supporting framework - the PREP model (plan, rehearse, execute, and post-session review) - is covered in detail.
The book is also filled with tools, checklists, and worksheets-as well as case studies from Oracle, UPS, and more. I aimed to make the book as practical as possible and I hope that training professionals will find the tips, sample exercises and icebreakers and real-world examples directly applicable to their work. 4
Darlene Christopher, Senior Knowledge & Learning Officer. World Bank
Why Utilize a Virtual Classroom?
Book Excerpt from "Tailored Learning":
The ability to interact with experts and peers in real time is a comfortable and familiar environment and eliminates the isolation that often comes with asynchronous technologies. Often a participant requires live interaction with an instructor or an expert, but that interaction does not need to be face-to-face.
For example, medical students observing surgery would, arguably, benefit from being physically in the operating room or a surgical observation area. However, those same participants do not need face-to-face interaction to ask post-operative questions of the surgeon. Questions can be asked and discussed among all of the participants via a virtual classroom. If a recording is made of the synchronous discussion, all the participants can go back and review the recording, at any time, to ensure that they understood the answers. One of the most common reasons for organizations to implement a virtual classroom is an audience that is dispersed across a large geographic area (oftentimes worldwide). Compared with traditional classroom delivery, the money saved in classroom costs, travel, and time away from work quickly becomes apparent. In addition, organizations may choose to deliver content that they never would have scheduled in a more traditional (classroom) setting. For example, an update to a computer system may only take one or two hours to teach, but an organization would rarely convene a training program for such a short period of time because it would be cost prohibitive. The virtual classroom makes this type of content easy to distribute.
As organizations become more global, and the need to collaborate across a distance is becoming more important, a virtual meeting place can help close the distance gap by providing a forum through which employees collaborate in real time.
Adobe Connect Tip: Polls and Chat Pods
If you are setting up your classroom in advance, and you'd like to bring in a poll or chat pod to place over a share pod (rather than going to a new layout), you can open, size, position and then hide all your pods in advance. When you then again pull them up from Pod > type (e.g. Chat) they will appear where you "last left them" - avoiding you having to maneuver them around the screen while learners are watching.
Managers want training in using virtual tools; in order to do their jobs better
While 87% of managers say that online meeting tools such as WebEx and Lync are mission critical, only 10% say they're competent and confident using those types of tools.
Source: Virtual Leadership - Closing the Distance, in Training Magazine, May/June 2015
Funky fonts in WebEx? Try this tip...
If your organization has its own "branded font" (and this is especially prevalent when using branded PowerPoint templates), you will often find that WebEx will display odd things on your slides such as words falling out of tables, headlines breaking where they did not break in the original PPT, etc.
The best fonts to use for smooth WebEx integration are Helvetica and Arial. Rather than muddle through each slide, simply go to your master slides and change the fonts there. You may still have to do some refinements, but it is still a much faster approach than editing each slide individually.
Adobe Connect Tip - for easier classroom management
One of the wonderful things about Adobe Connect is the fact that the pods make it so malleable... one of the maddening things about Adobe Connect is trying to get all those pods in place easily and at the right time.
One option: Create a layout for your activity instead.
Say, for example, your activity is for participants to respond to the question, How Do You Create the Perfect Impression on a New Client? What do you do before, during and after the sales call? and you have a separate chat pod for each response (before, during, after). Rather than try to move the pods in to the participant viewing area quickly and neatly, use a separate layout where they are already set up. Then, with one click, you can move the whole group to the layout.
From the menu bar, click Layout > Create New Layout
Then choose to create a blank layout (you will have to bring in every pod you want in this layout) or duplicate an existing layout (if you know you want video, attendee list and chat, you might want to duplicate the standard 'sharing' layout)
Give the layout a name so you can easily find it in the list of layouts on the right of your screen (using our example above, we'd probably call this layout Before, During, After)
Click OK. Populate the room with whatever pods you need (again, using our example, we'd need 3 chat pods)
Now, when that time in the course arrives, simply click on the Before, During, After layout thumbnail and voila! your three chat pods are at the ready and participants can begin their activity much more quickly.
Online Collaboration MUST be Designed
One of the most wonderful things about the online classroom is the ability to bring learners together who may otherwise be geographically separated. If one individual in New York and one individual in Arizona need the same training, the virtual classroom not only allows them to partake in that training without travel, but also to take that training with fellow learners.
Too often, however, the virtual classroom is used in presentation-mode rather than in collaborative-mode.
All virtual classroom platforms pledge that their product enables your organization and your learners to work collaboratively. And it is true. All virtual classroom platforms allow for learners to interact verbally, via chat or instant messenger, through the use of feedback symbols or emoticons, and often through breakout rooms which enable smaller discussions and group activities to occur.
This doesn't just happen spontaneously, however. It is imperative that the training be designed to be collaborative.
One of the basic tenets of adult learning is that adults prefer to learn collaboratively; in other words adults prefer to learn with others. Therefore, it is imperative that the focus of the learning process is on the learners working together, discussing, questioning, problem solving, and in general, contributing to the learning process and the learning content.
As Instructional Designers, we must put quite a bit of thought into how we can ensure the learners work together to achieve the learning outcome, rather than sitting at their individual sites being passive recipients of a presentation.
The "Problem" With Virtual Learning
We recently read this blog post which really made our blood to boil!
In a nutshell, the writer, a college professor, finds himself stranded at the airport and decides his situation should not impede his regularly scheduled class. He can simply use the virtual technology his college supplies, to fulfill his teaching obligations.
After experiencing an unsuccessful "class," he wrote a lengthy diatribe about how virtual technology will never replace face-to-face teaching. Here are some things he failed to consider (and, quite frankly, most people who are new to virtual technology or use it occasionally, also fail to consider):
1. Choose the right technology for the job and be sure you know how to use it. We recently received a directive from a client telling us to not use the highlighter tool to highlight text on the slide because "it doesn't work, it scribbles all over the slide." In fact, the "breakdown" was with the Bamboo tablet in our office.
2. You cannot decide, on the spur of the moment, that you will teach using virtual technology. A delivery of this type must be planned for (see next article). The writer bemoans: Tonight was going to involve role playing, discussions, presentations, and even interactive trivia.
3. If you have a limiting belief that you can only "lecture" while using virtual teaching platforms, and that cannot be as successful as you would have been in the classroom - you will be correct. His sentiments exactly: Tonight I am subjecting my students to this hollowed-out lesson. I do so out of necessity. I know it is not the best experience for my students, or for myself..
The server and the virtual platform have little to do with one another other than being the "power cord;" would you say that your electric company was horrible if your lamp shorted out? We'd be frustrated too: I am now on my third attempt at uploading the lecture. During the two previous attempts a prompt came up, saying "server failure." The program crashed and nothing was recorded or could be recovered. An hour lecture up in smoke - three times over, but it has nothing to do with the virtual classroom.
Virtual classrooms ARE the training room of the future. We recognize that not everyone will be comfortable there, and that's ok (not everyone is comfortable standing in front of a room speaking, either); but don't blame the technology for a lack of forethought, planning, or skill on the part of the human.
The Most Important Key to Facilitating in the Virtual Classroom
We all know good facilitation skills: ask don't tell; encourage discussion among participants-not just between you and the participants; play devil's advocate to challenge people's thinking, etc., but when we move from the classroom to the virtual classroom we seem to revert immediately to lecture and presentation mode.
If you think straightforward lecture is a snoozer in the classroom, it’s ten times worse in the virtual classroom when the only thing participants have to keep them engaged is the sound of your voice. In order to deliver online classes that are engaging, facilitation skills are more critical than ever.
A common complaint of new online facilitators is that the participants aren't paying attention and are frequently multitasking. That is only true if you are not facilitating. If you are facilitating, your participants would be too involved with the learning process to have the time or the inclination to multitask.
According to Wikipedia, a facilitator is someone who helps a group of people understand their common objectives and assists them in planning to achieve them. Another definition, also from Wikipedia, states that a facilitator is a person who makes it easier for other people to accomplish their objectives by offering advice and assistance. A common theme here is that the facilitator is not the focus of the learning event, the facilitator brings the learning about through the training participants.
The best virtual classroom learning experiences put the dialogue and the learning process firmly in the hands of the participants. If you're bringing people together online in order to simply make a presentation - don't. Record the presentation and let your participants view it on-demand. Bring people together online for the kind of interactive and collaborative outcomes that can only be achieved when we bring people together.
Does Size Matter?
Very often, when organizations move to virtual training, they think that the constraints of travel and space (learning space) are removed and it is now possible for a larger audience to take part in the training offering.
Not true! Compare these two simple visuals:
A circular table of 8 where everyone can see each other, hear each other and be involved with one another in an engaging and collaborative way.
A town-hall meeting in which a lot of people are in attendance, but only a few get to take the floor.
If YOU wanted your opinion heard, or you wanted to come away from the meeting having developed a relationship with the others in attendance, which meeting would you want to attend?
The circular table of 8 is the visual we need to keep in mind when designing for virtual delivery of training. Our learners are already hobbled by the fact that they cannot make eye contact with one another or read one another’s body language; but they CAN make connections with each other when there is a smaller group involved.
The real benefit of virtual delivery is that you can deliver the same topic as many times as you like, at any time that you like. So you can run 3 sessions, of 8 learners, in one week. This allows for more interaction and engagement among the learners. When the facilitator asks a question, it is quite obvious if 8 people have answered or 3 people have answered. When you poll them for their opinion, there is actually time to hear why people chose the answer they did – and allow for comparing and contrasting results.
With larger groups, we might undertake the same activities, but they will simply be ‘watched’ by some in attendance – it is not possible to involve everyone, in every activity, to the degree that they feel they are contributing to the content.
Smaller groups enhance learning outcomes, and virtual learning deliveries allow us to economically utilize smaller groups.