“We’d like to go on line with you but what will we do with these training manuals we bought?” We hear this so often, and now I’m going to tell you.
The process of converting to blended learning or full online is more about transforming the content and activities to provide a better experience and improve skills. I am going to outline the process for making this happen.
Decide with the stakeholder whether they want a blended course or all online. This decision will be dictated by budget and the audience to be reached. The need to move to online is often based on the need to scale up; the trainers just can’t reach everyone needed in person.
If you’re really looking at converting say, a three-day course you might not want nine hours of eLearning. A blended learning approach may be more effective. You can still scale up and help trainers reach more people by doing shorter live sessions combined with self-paced content.
Example: If we convert a 3-day classroom training course to blended learning, I start with the same 18 hours of content as before. I determine that about two thirds of the content are primarily information and foundational concepts that would be easy to create and practice in eLearning. That gives me 6 hours of self-paced eLearning.
The rest will be 6 hours of classroom training which will be one day.
What originally took learners nearly a full week including travel time, now will take them 12 hours and no travel time if the trainers if the only one that travels. The financial benefits of self-paced online learning become immediately obvious.