After being forced by COVID to adopt and deliver virtual and remote training programs, you would assume we would be jumping at the chance to go back to in-person learning.
But is that really the case?
The Institute for Corporate Performance (I4CP) asked over 300 learning leaders about their experience with online learning and what facilitating will look like in the future at their respective businesses. The results were eye-opening: 69% of these learning leaders said 60% or more of their learning would likely remain online — a far cry from what most assumed!
Why is this?
It turns out that online learning provides a lot of benefits for facilitators and learners. From the top driving factors cited in this same study, we can extrapolate a few key benefits organizations get from facilitating virtually:
- More flexibility for learners to join in safely when ill or needing to work from home.
- Cost savings from not maintaining large corporate classrooms.
- Cost savings realized through lower travel expenses.
- Reduced opportunity costs by not requiring learners to take multiple consecutive full days off to attend training.
- More ability to deliver content into smaller pieces, helping with learner retention.
- the scalability it offered instructor-led training virtually (50%).
- Health and safety benefits — once this pandemic is just a distant memory, we’ll still have learners affected by illnesses. By offering a remote connection option these learners can participate without potentially infecting others who are attending.
In summary, online learning is beneficial for its flexibility and cost effectiveness, and it’s far safer than in-person learning.
Of course, this all depends on if the virtual learning is delivered well or not.
A well-planned and well-led virtual learning session has countless benefits to a company and to their team, however, a poorly executed one… not so much.
The benefits of remote learning and facilitating are only important when they have the same effectiveness as an in-person session. When asked what the primary barriers to achieving optimal effectiveness in delivering online learning, 47% of learning leaders cited lack of time to commit to online learning as their key issue.
The second highest conflict? A lack of virtual producers to help facilitators in online learning. This is because high performing learning departments have come to realize the benefit virtual producers bring to enhancing the learner experience with remote learning. The challenge is that not enough of them know where to find, or how to develop these production resources.
In fact, this is a central premise of our new e-book. In the book we talk about what a producer is, why they help and how to find them. It’s why we launched our virtual production services back in 2020.
When looking at these statistics and benefits, what’s the plan for learning in your organization?
- Are you looking to stay remote, hybrid, or go back to completely in-person learning sessions?
- Are you having trouble with online learning due to lack of time, lack of producers, or lack of training or knowledge?
- We would love to hear from you about your future plans or how we could make staying remote more of a possibility for your business’s future.
Remember, we can start from where we are now, we don’t have to start from where we were.
