Everything We Learned About Digital Training, After 1 Year of Positive Workplaces
Positive Workplaces started on a bus. Me and Nikki, PW’s Chief Well-Being Officer, were both in Melbourne as Australia Award scholars; I was studying Leadership and she, Positive Psychology, so we decided to work together to create something that can change workplaces the way we envision them to be. PW was thus born, aiming to co-create positive cultures that can enhance the well-being of the Filipino workforce through courses, training sessions, webinars, and consultations.
We recently reached the one-year mark, and while a pandemic was definitely not in our plans, we thought we’d share some of the most valuable lessons we learned about digital learning and training from the inaugural year of PW.
Focus on Experiences…
Before we even begin researching and crafting content for webinars and courses, we always imagine the experience we want people to have. These experiences become the basis of the modules and the content that we include.
Nikki pointed out that a lot of educators these days are tempted to drop as much content as possible in an effort to impart voluminous information to the audience, but this actually has the opposite effect: people walk away remembering almost nothing. Teaching is a two-way street—don’t just think about what you’re going to say, also keep in mind how people will listen to and experience it.
...But Don’t Forget to Make It Positive
Bloom’s Taxonomy (from (Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, 2010)
In our upcoming course on Designing Positive Training Experiences, we try to marry positive psychology with the experiential instructional design we know works. This is because according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, learners have to remember first before they understand; then applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating will follow. ‘Remembering’ and ‘Understanding’ are generally connected to emotions—regardless if it’s very painful or very fulfilling.
This emotional connection is a requirement because the fuel for learning is directly related to motivation. I once had a teacher who discussed strategic planning models through coercion and terror, sometimes even embarrassing us in front of everyone in class. While there’s some truth that without them, I wouldn’t know how to strategize the way we’re doing now with PW, it’s also true that a terrorizing learning experience is not the only way to achieve retention. An alternative can be positive experiences, because just like negative ones, the emotional connection can fuel learners to remember and understand.
A great example of this would be our Culture Changers internship program. We make sure our interns feel that it’s okay to fail; if they did, we would help them fix it. Whenever we’d give feedback, we make sure to point out what we loved about their approach and how they were able to maximize their strengths; also making sure that all suggestions are constructive and ultimately helpful. This positive reinforcement facilitates quick learning, and this is an ethos we try to live by in our courses and webinars as well.
In Digital Learning, Design is Vital
Good design is what makes these positive experiences possible. I have years of public speaking experience, but I’m aware that without good design, audiences will not listen to me; especially not in an online setting. At least in person, if I’m standing in front of a room, people will feel my presence, they will see my face and see me walking around. There’s nothing like that in digital—I’m always just a screen.
Design is what we use to make up for the lost experience of face-to-face learning. The results are apparent in the post-evaluations we get from learners: they say that the training is very engaging and involved. These interactions were not just initiated by facilitators, but by the design.
When we started PW we knew we wanted a unique learning approach. Our courses, webinars, and trainings are:
Output-oriented. We don’t just present information; we help our learners transform their learnings and insights into strategies and applications they can immediately put into action.
Evidence-based. All our courses and trainings are anchored on reliable frameworks and resources.
Learner-centric. We believe that a learner’s insights, values, and worldviews are relevant to their learning experience, so we gear our sessions towards their participation; be it through personal assessments and profile tests or real-time polls and prompts.
Activity-based. We use a wide variety of tools to help learners retain new information, making the session more interactive and dynamic. This includes real-time activities, worksheets, assessments, and of Q&As.
Nobody foresaw remote learning—PW was only about a month old when the Philippines went into lockdown—and we know so many people are sick of it. But as time went on, we realized that, if you’re strategic and creative enough, anyone can have the opportunity to make online learning just as great, maybe even greater, than face-to-face sessions. Of course online learning is a different beast altogether, but it also opens a lot of doors for different kinds of learning experiences.
Simplicity is Key
Simplicity is such a great asset for digital learning, because when we make things simple, it’s easier for people to comprehend in a platform that’s so unattractive to learn from. For every PW training session and webinar, we use the framework Why, What, How, and while it seems very basic, it’s actually easier to recall. Putting complex concepts through such an intuitive framework makes it easier to digest: Why is it important to know about this?; What is it, what do the concepts look like?; and How can we apply these learnings in the more practical sense?
Engage, Engage, Engage
In a training session, if I talk for even just three minutes straight, I can see the audience start looking at their phones or doing something else. This is because in digital learning, they have the power to do so; they are, after all, in the comfort of their own homes. This is why we avoid what Nikki called “Death by PowerPoint,” where learning is heavily reliant on the presentation to the point that instructors just read the slides. Frankly, it’s a waste of the instructor’s expertise, and it’s a lost opportunity for peer learning, because people don’t get to interact with their fellow learners in the room.
Gamification is among the top trends in training right now, and for good reason. When we first introduced Kahoot, learners were at the edge of their seat; everyone was eager to participate. It also enabled us to see the difference between their responses pre- and post-training, so those kinds of software and tools help us measure comprehension. It’s incredibly helpful to know what type of play tools would fit certain situations: quizzes, group games, individual games, or trivia games.
Feedback is also something many learners clamor for in sessions. The world is less validating in a pandemic, so people getting positive feedback, even just in training sessions, is already a validation of self. Even such a small thing can already contribute to people’s well-being.
The Teacher is Not the Only Expert in the Room
Related to what she said earlier on “Death by PowerPoint,” Nikki asserts that peer learning is among the many things educators can do to engage people more and to help them learn from each other. The teacher is not the only expert in the room; the attendees are also experts who have their own experiences as well. They should be able to share that wisdom. Nikki adds:
“I was a teacher before, and my philosophy has always been constructivist. As a teacher you don’t input the knowledge to your students; instead, you draw the knowledge out of them. Nobody comes to your sessions knowing nothing, so draw out what they know. Then connect what you’re teaching to that knowledge, and make them feel like it’s really relevant. Make them excited to learn it because their lives will be better afterwards. I really tried to put that teaching philosophy in all our webinars.”
The Way You Teach Has Ripple Effects
Traditional learning styles often frame the learner as the recipient of knowledge, and this kind of learning experiences ripple into the type of leadership we have: unstrategic, less creative. By subverting learning styles as being more than just supplying answers to students, then educators have that opportunity to create creative and strategic leaders. Future leaders can be given space to actually experiment, play, come up with their own ideas, and create solutions inside the learning experience you create.
Additionally, every training experience is a chance to improve someone’s well-being. You can teach, but you can also help them feel better about life and themselves.
The time to improve your digital teaching experiences is now.
The pandemic has proven that rescaling and upskilling should be among the top priorities of organizations during such a period of uncertainty. One of the biggest competitive advantages of organizations is their capability to provide effective learning opportunities for their team, because this will translate into the capacity of the organization to withstand drastic change.
Join us in our course on Designing Positive Digital Experiences, which you can learn more about here. We hope to see you there!
