Are in-person workshops dead? How virtual learning can be as good as the real thing

The future of online learning seems bright, according to LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report. After years of being underfunded and underappreciated, there is a projected uptick in the size of learning and development budgets. Given the rise in the number of people working from home as a result of the pandemic, these budget dollars are naturally being shifted from in-person instructor-led training to live virtual instructor-led training, or VILT.

The challenge with this type of learning delivery is that participants still want to learn in an environment where they can interact with their colleagues. Although self-driven learning effectively imparts information, it lacks the social element that people crave, further exacerbated for many by the isolation of working from home.

During 2020, we sought to create a platform to capture both the effectiveness and interaction of virtual in-person ILT. What emerged is VILT that is as good as an in-person event, according to our program participants. In an evaluation of one of our recent virtual workshops completed by about half of participants (20 people), 85 percent said the effectiveness was about the same as that of an in-person workshop.

In this article, we will share two case studies that illustrate how we created workshops specifically for VILT delivery and converted in-person ILT programs to virtual ones without sacrificing impact and user satisfaction. We’ll also share some lessons we learned along the way.

Case 1: A workshop created for virtual delivery

A pharmaceutical company asked us to create a workshop on resilience to help one of its product groups weather the barrage of change hitting them over the past few years. We knew we needed to deliver content that provided ideas and suggestions for coping with continual change and the uncertainty it brings.

While we hadn’t reached a conclusion on the ideal workshop length, we had the sense that Zoom fatigue begins to set in at around the 90-minute mark. We also determined it would be important to devote the bulk of the time in a virtual workshop to allowing participants to work together on skill-building exercises.

We kept both of these things in mind as we developed the workshop content. We created a presentation, but were careful to limit the number of slides. We also used illustrative graphics and kept word count to a minimum. These are best practices for any presentation, but we think it’s even more important online than in an in-person meeting. In addition to purchasing the rights to use stock photos, we used a PowerPoint feature called “Design Ideas,” a tool that generates a series of formatting variations that you can apply to add interest to your slides.

Creating activities to keep participants from being bored or distracted is a bigger challenge for online workshops than creating content, so we set a rule of thumb to engage early and often by involving people in activities and exercises. For example, after defining the term “resilience,” we launched a poll to gauge how people were feeling about their level of resilience. This activity helped break up and reinforce our lecture, engaged the participants and encouraged them to think more in-depth about the topic.

As another way of breaking up the lecture, we inserted a three-and-a-half-minute, fast-paced video that featured someone illustrating the narration on a white board. No talking heads.

The most effective method of engagement was small group breakouts. In one of these, we created a simulation in which participants had to react to change. People were assigned at random to breakout rooms and were given 10 minutes to come up with a simple, fun business idea — the wilder, the better. We warned them we were going to throw them a few curve balls, but we didn’t tell them what those would be.

At the end of the 10 minutes, we threw the first curveball, which was taking one person out of each room and reassigning them to a different room. The second curveball was a broadcast message to all the breakout rooms: “News flash: One of your competitors has come up with the very same idea and they’ve already put it into development. You have 10 more minutes to talk. What are you going to do?”

When we brought everyone back to the main room, we asked a few of the groups to tell everyone about their business idea. Then we debriefed, asking a few questions and ending with, “What was your key takeaway?” The response? Just what we were hoping for: The importance of staying flexible. And just as important, people had fun and came up with some really creative ideas.

According to their workshop evaluations, participants particularly enjoyed the breakout-group exercises and suggested we spend more time on them. They enjoyed talking with peers they don’t often have the opportunity to interact with. They also wanted more time back in the main room to hear about every group’s experience rather than just a few. One workshop participant commented on their evaluation that even 90 minutes is too long. In contrast, another said it would have been better as a half-day session — that an hour and a half wasn’t long enough to fully engage in the activities together.

Case 2: A workshop converted to virtual delivery

For the same pharmaceutical product group, we converted two skill-development workshops originally designed for in-person delivery to a virtual platform. In doing so, we faced two major challenges: timing and participant engagement.

Our first hurdle was turning four half-day modules into two 90-minute sessions. We found we could be more succinct with our talking points. For example, when we talked in person about building trusted relationships, we’d say that a key to building trust is acting with integrity. Then, we’d spell out that integrity means being honest, fulfilling one’s commitments, etc. In tightening our message, we assumed adult professionals understand what integrity is; there was no need to define it for them.

The second hurdle was reviewing activities to see what we could convert. Some, like Zoom Books, which we intended to use as an ice breaker, had to go. Zoom Books arrive intact and create a unified story from a set of sequential pictures. To do the exercise, you take the pages out of the book, order them randomly, and hand out one page to each participant. Without showing their picture to others, people must talk with one another to see if their pictures have anything in common. The objective is to sequence the pages in the correct order by laying them out on a table or on the floor — not something that lends itself to a virtual classroom.

Instead, we chose a different but related exercise about building strategic connections within their organization. We modified the activity to be both an icebreaker and a takeaway assignment. The in-class activity served to warm up and engage the group.

We created breakout groups of five people each and asked them to do two things:

• Work individually to identify two people in the organization who they didn’t already know but with whom they wanted to connect.
• Have each person take a turn telling the others who they wanted to connect with and why, then have the group discuss that connection.

These group discussions, in some cases, revealed somebody in the group who knew the identified person and offered to make an introduction. In other cases, group brainstorming identified ways to make the connection.

Between the two sessions, the assignment was for each person to try to make at least one of their desired connections. The assignment was intended as a developmental action participants could apply back on the job to reinforce what they had learned in the first session.

We began the second session by having a few people talk about their strategic connection experiences. One of the best stories came from a participant who contacted someone in the company whom she’d never met, but whom she knew was conducting similar work. They had a good exchange of information, which gave our participant great ideas she can adapt and apply to her own situation.

Additional tips

The importance of good meeting software, and of purchasing a plan rather than relying on free versions, can’t be understated. You need unrestricted features like screen sharing, whiteboard, polling and breakout rooms that are ideally suited to replicating in-person facilitation techniques.

We learned from participants’ workshop evaluations that distraction is more of a problem during an online program than during one that’s face-to-face. When you take people out of their work environment to attend an in-person session, especially if you request that phones and computers be turned off, distractions can largely be left behind. But when people are attending a virtual session from their workplace or work-at-home environment, they are exposed to the distractions of other adults, children, pets, a ringing telephone, the latest big sale popping up in an email, etc. The antidote to distraction in online learning is engagement: Involve participants with polls, pop quizzes, games and skill-building activities. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, suggests, “Tell them something they already know, and when they answer correctly, it’ll send the message of how smart they are. From then on, they’ll pay attention to get more positive reinforcement of their intelligence.”

Finally, this advice, shared by our colleague Janet Fiore, CEO of The Sierra Group, which advises companies on hiring and accommodating those with disabilities: The challenges of online learning can cause barriers for a person with a visual or hearing impairment or a learning disability (ADD, dyslexia, etc.), or for someone who experiences anxiety. Individuals who have disabilities are often reluctant to ask for accommodations.

So, consider these tips for greater inclusion as you conduct remote learning:

• Incorporate in your invitation language that signals inclusion; for example, “To request a reasonable accommodation to participate in our session, please talk with your supervisor, email [name] or contact human resources.”
• Ensure the invitation itself is accessible. Think font size, font colors and alternative text that describes the appearance and function of an image.
• Use the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to ensure documents that will be shared during the session are meeting basic digital accessibility standards.

The future of VILT

VILT is here to stay. It’s more cost-effective, can be delivered faster and can reach people across the country and the world. That’s not to say in-person training and workshops are dead. Hybrid programs that combine in-person and virtual ILT, as well as self-driven e-learning, present the ultimate flexibility to curriculum designers.