How Do You Solve the Classroom vs. Virtual Training Problem?

Focus on Outcomes.

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Ineffective training costs businesses $13.5 million per year, per 1,000 employees.1

of organizations are actively seeking to replace their current learning platforms within the next two years—while more than half of them say within one year.2

of organizations say their training budgets remained flat or decreased in 2016.3

The Cost of Training Stagnation

$13.5m 44% 63%

1 Training Gets a Trim: Microlearning for a New Workforce, Grovo, May 26, 2015.2 Learning Technology 2016: Embracing Innovation for a Better Learner Experience, Brandon Hall Group, July 2016.3 2016 Training Industry Report, Training Magazine, November/December 2016.

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Historically, corporate learning and development has been a face-to-face event—and for good reason. In-person training has helped you encourage productive interaction and foster a collaborative learning environment. It’s shown you what’s worked and what hasn’t, giving you the flexibility to adjust your approach based on learners’ feedback. And it’s helped your attendees achieve some great results.

But in today’s environment, there’s a lot affecting your ability to deliver in-person training. Budgets are shrinking, you’re teaching more people—and covering more course content—than ever before, and you have less time for prep and delivery. What’s more, your learners don’t always have the freedom to set aside their day-to-day responsibilities for travel. Despite all of this, you’re still expected to consistently deliver quality training and impactful business outcomes.

It’s natural to respond by cutting back on the number or frequency of classes you offer, or restricting who can attend your trainings. Or, like most instructors, you’ll try to save money, limit the disruptions caused by travel, and extend your courses to more learners by working to replicate the traditional classroom experience in a virtual space.

Corporate Learning and Development is Changing…

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When teaching a class means cobbling together isolated web conferencing, chat, or whiteboarding tools, the very things you trust to support your delivery can actually create a sizable gap between virtual and face-to-face training. This is one of the main reasons why 62% of instructors believe they are not doing a good job meeting their learners’ needs.4 The tools they’re relying on aren’t optimized for virtual instruction, and it’s having a noticeable effect on participant engagement.

…And the Old Ways Just Can’t Keep Pace

4 10 Statistics on Corporate Training and What They Mean for Your Company’s Future, SHIFT eLearning, January 28th, 2016.5 Beyond the Classroom: Trends in B2B Sales Training, Corporate Visions, 2017.6 Workplace Learning – 2015, 24x7 Learning, September 2015.

The compromises you have to make to transition the in-person learning experience to an online world become even more pronounced when you consider that 65% of companies plan to spend more on virtual training.5 So it’s not just basic courses anymore. As more classes move online, you’ll soon be expected to deliver critical, high-stakes training virtually.

Executing these courses effectively is certainly crucial, especially when only 12% of individuals can apply the skills they learn in corporate training to their jobs.6 If the shift to a virtual space tempers the impact of these high-stakes courses, it can harm your organization’s competitive standing or even put compliance in jeopardy. And should this happen, it can diminish your value as a trainer, leaving you with even less time and resources for instruction going forward.

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In this increasingly virtual environment, it’s not about making compromises between what you could do in a classroom and what you’ll cope with online. The real issue is outcomes: How do you deliver course content in a clear, effective manner, so attendees absorb—and retain—the most vital concepts? Regardless of the method, tools, or setting, outcomes are what will truly define the value of your courses—to you and your learners alike.

To drive the best possible outcomes, you need to routinely collect feedback from every participant, so you can make continuous, worthwhile improvements to your delivery. You must increase learner engagement—without resorting to attention-grabbing tricks or diversions. And finally, you need to prepare your course content in an easy, repeatable manner—while making it available to attendees before, during, and after class—so you have more time for the actual act of instruction.

The Time for Change is Now

In short, you need to sharpen your focus on outcomes.

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What if you could …

But what if you could create a continuous,

actionable feedback loop?

At the same time, what if you could forge

real, lasting engagement with your learners?

And what if you could break the stage-restage-repeat

cycle?

Solving learning and development challenges like these is never easy, especially when you consider everything else you have to do to meet organizational training goals.

If you could, you’d be well positioned to continually source actionable feedback, increase attendee engagement, and simplify every aspect of course preparation, so you can sharpen your focus on outcomes. You wouldn’t just close the gap between the face-to-face and virtual worlds; you’d surpass the “gold standard” and set a new bar beyond what’s been possible in-person. And most importantly, you’d deliver outstanding results that have a tangible, enduring impact on your learners.

With AirClass from Lenovo Software, you can.

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Goals like these are some of the many reasons organizations like yours have chosen AirClass as their learning and development platform.

With AirClass, you’ll be able to overcome the biggest challenges plaguing your business, including:

With AirClass, You Can

Maintaining attendee engagement

Continuously staging class content

Here’s how…

Collecting actionable feedback

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Attendee feedback has always been key to measuring how well learners grasp and retain your training’s core concepts. It allows you to course-correct, so your approach and content stay fresh, relevant, and impactful. However, as you move to virtual classrooms, it can be difficult to get the same level of feedback you received in a traditional, face-to-face setting.

To compensate, you might send out polls to make sure participants understand what you’re teaching. But the metrics these yield are limited at best—and certainly not valuable enough to make up for the interruptions they cause. You could wait until the course completes to source feedback, but that means relying on simple surveys that cover delivery across basic categories—which makes it tough to trust the data you receive, especially when it lacks specificity or a meaningful sample size.

Without the ability to gather live, comprehensive, unbiased feedback, you can’t course-correct while class is in session—nor effectively analyze and adjust your approach post-training. As a result, any changes you make to your delivery might not even be in the best interest of the course going forward.

The Challenge: Limited Feedback

Only 35% of the talent development professionals surveyed reported that their organizations evaluated the business results of learning programs to any extent.7

7 Evaluating Learning: Getting to the Measurements that Matter, ATD Research, 2016.

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Actionable feedback drives positive outcomes. But if the methods you use to gather it actively distract from your delivery or provide limited data, it can leave you uncertain which aspects of your course need refining to drive the best outcomes. When you use AirClass, you’ll be able to collect actionable feedback from every attendee, both during and after class, so you can continuously improve delivery.

With the solution’s Emotion Insights, you’ll record your session and collect data points associated with different emotional states, so you can see where your materials, curriculum, and presentation style elicited strong, negative, or indifferent responses. You’ll supplement the data you get from surveys and polls, learning what works and what doesn’t, and making the appropriate adjustments.

In addition, you’ll use solution’s Engagement Score, a robust participation metric, to see in real time how

well attendees are connecting with your course content. You can check the score by individual or the class as a whole and use the insights you uncover to modify your approach as appropriate. By making these adjustments on the fly, you’ll be able to keep participants hooked and ensure they’re absorbing the critical concepts needed to develop richer skills, advance their jobs, take on more responsibility, and help the company grow.

The AirClass Solution: Create a Continuous, Actionable Feedback Loop

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Engagement is fundamental to a successful training. But as more of your courses move online, keeping learners’ attention becomes increasingly difficult. Distractions abound: there are inboxes to clean up, instant messages to reply to, and browser tabs to flip between. So what should be a clear, direct, uninterrupted interaction with your attendees turns into a battle for their attention spans.

You might be tempted to resort to artificial methods—like poll questions with little connection to the concepts you’re teaching—to spike engagement. Sprinkling these moments into your delivery adds limited value to the course and does nothing to hold attention long-term. And since you typically have to jump between multiple tools to address engagement issues, you risk being as distracted as your attendees. You’ll fall out of the flow of the class, creating lulls that only make it harder to ward off distractions. And when you can’t stay focused on your teaching, you’ll struggle to deliver the outcomes your learners desire and the organization demands.

The Challenge: Difficulty Maintaining Attendee Engagement

32% of employees find online learning content uninspiring.8

8 Embracing Change: 2015-16 Industry Benchmark Report, Towards Maturity, November 2015.

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Engaged learners are successful learners. But when you’re unable to overcome the distractions inherent in a virtual world, you’ll struggle to achieve the best possible outcomes. But with AirClass, you’ll be able to create and maintain sustained, organic engagement, so both you and your learners get the most out of your trainings.

For example, with the solution’s Control Center and Broadcast Feeds, you’ll have the freedom to seamlessly—and nondisruptively—move between content types and delivery methods as you see fit. With cameras, presentations, whiteboards, and more a mere button press away, you’ll be able to open your course with a presentation, quickly flip to a video, cue up a webcam, and then take a poll before concluding with the rest of the presentation.

And with the AirClass Replay capability, you’ll have the flexibility to manage your valuable classroom time in a manner that delivers the best, most impactful outcomes to each and every attendee. For example, you’ll be able “flip” the classroom by making recorded instruction available before the live event and reserving the in-class time for exercises, projects, or group discussions.

Finally, with the solution’s Breakout Rooms, you’ll be able to design small group learning activities as a seamless extension of the live session, giving your attendees more opportunities to collaborate and pool their knowledge as they work through a particularly complex topic.

The AirClass Solution: Forge Real, Lasting Engagement with Your Learners

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One thing that hasn’t changed with the shift from face-to-face to online is the amount of time and effort required to build, organize, and stage course content. Just like with in-person trainings, you build it once and then have to do it all over again—locate the same materials, send the same emails, rebuild the same curriculum—even if the next course simply repeats the last one.

It’s difficult to proactively prepare your material and ready your participants when content resides in disparate locations and has to be moved between multiple collaboration, communication, and conferencing tools. The time you spend searching for and staging material means you have less to

refine your delivery or augment your approach to cater to more attendees.

You might think recording your courses could alleviate these issues, but that can only get you so far. The playback is static, diminishing the value of any captured interactions. Unique elements, like chats, polls, and whiteboard presentations, may no longer be in context—if they make the recording at all. Because of this, you can’t replicate the live experience. You can’t empower those who missed the training to review and access content or collaborate with their peers. And, ultimately, you can’t deliver the best experience to all potential learners.

The Challenge: Continuous Staging of Class Content

The course build is the most important thing to get right if you want your students to have a successful learning experience.9

9 The Challenges of Being an Online Professor, eLearners.

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Continuously staging—and restaging—course materials demands a massive amount of your attention. It’s an endless cycle that repeats every time a new class is set to start, leaving you with little time for refinement. With AirClass, you’ll be able to prepare your course content in an easy, repeatable manner—and make it readily available to your learners before, during, and after class—so you can stay focused on more crucial matters.

Using the solution’s Activity Stream, both you and your participants can pin comments, key concepts, critical content, and more to a centralized, continuously accessible virtual collaboration area. You can share any requisite pre-work before launching the live event, helping attendees be better prepared when the course begins. Likewise, you can post follow-up materials to keep learners engaged after the session.

What’s more, you’ll be able to pull content from multiple locations, organize it, and store everything in a continually accessible master collection. And with the solution’s course and classroom collections, you’ll have a centralized space in which to organize, manage, and update all past, current, and future courses. You’ll create dedicated, virtual “rooms” for each class and keep them open for as long as you wish, giving you and your attendees the freedom to revisit, re-examine, and re-engage with your content as needed.

The AirClass Solution: Break the Stage-Restage- Repeat Cycle

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Create a continuous, actionable feedback loop: By tracking learners’ emotions throughout your session and keeping a close eye on participation, you can spot areas that elicited poor responses, and correct your content and delivery accordingly—in real time and after the fact. You’ll make feedback a natural part of your teaching approach, giving you the flexibility to make changes on the fly that lead to more satisfied learners and better outcomes.

Forge real, lasting engagement with your learners: When you can quickly shift between engagement methods, record and replay courses in their entirety, and free attendees to collaborate in small groups, you’ll help learners stay engaged and absorb educational content at their own pace. As a result, you’ll hold your classes’ attention better and give attendees more reason to interact with the information you’re delivering. And when you do, you’ll know your content is being well received and working to drive the expected outcomes, session after session.

Break the stage-restage-repeat cycle: When you can give everyone, even those who couldn’t make the live training, continuous access to your content, supplementary materials, and any related discussions, learners can engage with the course when and how they want. And because everything is stored in a master collection, you’re able to quickly associate specific materials with a specific training as needed—without rebuilding classes over and over. As a result, you can create persistent classrooms that remain open, so everyone has multiple opportunities to experience your courses, engage with the content, and absorb its most vital points.

Why AirClass?

When you choose AirClass as your learning and development platform, you’re able to:

And when you achieve these three objectives, you’ll be well on your way to driving improved outcomes from your learning and development efforts. Ready to get started? Visit airclass.com

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