You’re planning some high-quality classroom events and, whilst you’re comfortable with the investment, they will exhaust the travel and accommodation budget. But, in order to get the best from them they need to be supported before and after, in a way that allows your people to interact and participate. E-learning doesn’t allow for the levels of interaction people get from being in a room together so, if you can’t fund that, what can you do?
At edoMidas, we’ve been using the ‘virtual classroom’ to solve that conundrum and provide people with an opportunity to learn and develop from wherever they are in the world, without leaving their desks.
We’ve used it to deliver 1-2-1 coaching, individual and group training sessions, and as a tool to facilitate multi-site team discussions.
Just as with e-learning and mobile learning, the virtual classroom isn’t designed to completely replace face-to-face training sessions. But it can be used as an effective way to supplement them and avoid having to fly people to a specific location every time.
As an example, one of our clients is using the virtual classroom to deliver introductory sessions as a ‘front-end’ to a face-to-face training session. If everyone has access to a webcam this is a great way for people based in different locations to meet each other and be given basic information around what to expect during the next stage of the programme.
Another uses it as a way of helping to embed learning from a classroom event into the individual’s day-to-day activity. This is an easy way for people to re-connect with their colleagues, share their experiences of how they’ve put their learning into practice and keep it alive long after the training session has finished. It’s a great way of solving the age-old problem of nothing happening beyond the classroom!
We can even run short, insightful ‘SmartClass’ sessions using the virtual classroom that put the spotlight on specific topics. This can be anything from designing the perfect pitch to holding positive performance conversations with your team members. In this way, people are given access to interactive learning from the comfort of their own desk.
Although the virtual classroom is not a cheap alternative to the classroom (albeit you do save on travel and accommodation costs), it can be an incredibly flexible addition to your learning and development offering and it takes the participants’ experience of online learning to a whole new level.
Click here if you would like to find out a bit more about our virtual classroom sessions. If you think this could form a part of your learning and development offering come and talk to us and we can arrange for you to test-drive the virtual classroom so you can experience it for yourself.