In my last post, I argued that, although face-to-face learning has been the default since the dawn of time, online learning has changed everything. As we have discovered over the past few weeks, online learning is scalable, flexible, accessible to all but a small minority, economical, environmentally advantageous and, of course, socially distant. What’s not to like?

So OK, there are situations when we simply can’t achieve what we want online, which is fine because, in time, we’ll be able to go back to doing some learning face-to-face. Used judiciously and typically as part of a blend, face-to-face learning is capable of adding tremendous value. But not for everyday learning, for special occasions.

Let’s imagine you’re currently in a position in which you simply have to deliver your programmes online because your classrooms are all closed up.  You still have a big decision to make …

1. Should I develop online materials to cover the content of my programmes?
2. Or should I run live online sessions that approximate what I currently do in the classroom?

If you spend most of your time in a classroom, you’ll be drawn to option 2, because the experience will be similar and you will have less work to do in developing materials. But, in doing so, you only take advantage of some of the benefits of online learning – the social distancing, the reduced carbon footprint, the cost reduction. What you don’t get is the scalability and the flexibility. You can’t address as large an audience as quickly as you can with digital content and you can’t offer your learners the opportunity to learning when they want, at the pace they want and in the way they want. So there has to be a good reason for delivering your sessions live. In short …

Live online learning is also for special occasions

So, what are those special occasions? Why do you want to fix your learners to a particular date and time? Here are some arguments:

1
Live events allow for a free-flowing dialogue, something that is simply not going to happen by email, in a forum or on Twitter. Many learning activities, including role-plays, simply have to be live.

2
In a live event, you have the potential to get quick answers to your questions and immediate feedback on your performance. This level of responsiveness can be important in some situations, such as learning to operate a process or to handle customer queries. Generally speaking, a real-time approach gets the job done quickly, whereas it can take ages to resolve an issue while you wait for people to respond when it suits them.

3
Live events can also have more emotional energy (sometimes negative as well as positive) than their self-paced equivalents. Most of us would prefer to watch a big sporting event as it happens rather than see the recording sometime later, even if we do not know the outcome. There is something about experiencing an event as it happens in the company of our peers, whether that’s face to face or online. And this upsurge of emotion is going to make a big difference in terms of what we remember.

4
In the context of a blended solution, live events also act as a milestone to encourage learners to get the self-paced work done. In a course which has no timetable, it is inevitable that individual study will be put off to a later date – after all, learning is rarely the most urgent task on our to-do lists. Even if deadlines are established for self-paced learning, there is always the feeling that these could easily be pushed back if required. However, when a programme is punctuated with live events, there is a massive incentive to get on with your ‘homework’ – no-one wants to be the one who hasn’t got their assignments done.

Choices, choices, choices. To keep it simple, let’s reduce all this to three steps:

1. By default, deliver your learning programme as online content
2. When online content won’t do the job (you want free-flowing discussion, you need to provide instant feedback, you want emotional energy, you want to introduce milestones into a longer programme, and so on) then consider delivering some elements live and online
3. When live and online still isn’t enough (people need to be hands-on, you need full attention, you need maximum sensitivity to body language, etc.) then consider delivering some elements face-to-face

Except, of course, that option 3 is not available at the moment. So, make option 2 work.

Easy