Feature
The benefits of virtual learning, for both employees and their employers, are well-documented. Moving the classroom online offers employers cost efficiency by reducing the need for physical spaces and travel, enhances flexibility with anytime-anywhere access to training and makes scaling to adapt to company growth easier.
The catch? Employees need to actually use these options in order to make them worth it. One study has found that one in six employees are actively dissatisfied with their company’s L&D offerings.
To improve satisfaction (and therefore participation), L&D leaders need to make deliberate efforts to create engaging, consumer-grade experiences.
Digital Doldrums
While asynchronous forms of elearning have been around for a while, shifting live learning sessions to digital formats has been a more recent phenomenon.. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been as effective as hoped.
Christopher Lind, chief learning officer at Chenmed, said the problem is companies took an in-person experience and tried to deliver it the same way online, without first adapting it to the virtual world. “It hasn't gone very well because you tried to deliver something in a modality it was never designed for,” he said.
In his experience, most live sessions tend to require a lot of listening, which he says is easier for employees when they’re in a controlled environment. When this is happening through a computer screen amid the other stresses of an employee’s environment, it’s harder to concentrate.
“What would have maybe been fun or meaningful or even a benefit now just feels like nails on a chalkboard,” Lind said.
And while offering both live sessions and self-directed courses online does open them up to a broader audience, there’s a lack of nuance that comes with scale.
Marc Steven Ramos, chief learning officer at Cornerstone OnDemand and former head of global training at Google, explained that for companies looking to create “general awareness,” a quickly produced online course or session is fine, but for more advanced topics that require a deep understanding and proficiency, something designed to apply to everyone might end up being too diluted to be viable.
“A lot of the training that's virtual these days was intentionally built for the masses,” Ramos said. “So, by nature, it must be contained within certain parameters because it can't be personalized for 10,000 people.”
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The Creator Economy
Another issue in today’s virtual learning environment is that there’s a lot of content for employees to shift through.
“You have a dynamic variety of not just a hundred but thousands of online learning assets to choose from,” Ramos said. “It's paradoxical in the sense that you need a variety but, my gosh, you don't need 10,000; you just need five.”
One of the issues is what we could call the consumerization of learning and development. The internet and social media have made it possible for any subject matter expert to create learning content, so, instead of working with course developers, these experts are exacerbating content overload, which in turn is making learners more critical of the content they might be given by an employer.
Ramos said employees are also quite savvy about what good production looks like and, much like consumers, expert the kind of personalization and control that a course for 10,000 typically can’t provide.
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AI, Not VR, Is the Play
It’s difficult to talk about virtual learning without bringing up the promises of virtual reality (VR) headsets, which studies show can help users practice soft skills such as public speaking. But it does come with a caveat.
“They're extremely powerful when used correctly. They're extremely destructive when used incorrectly,” Lind explained. “If you're not doing spatial learning, and the environment is not a key variable in the effectiveness of the learning, then scratch them. You’re actually adding unnecessary complexity to the mix.”
Ramos added that VR headsets can cause unpleasant physical side effects such as nausea, dizziness and eye strain, which research backs up.
Still, both Lind and Ramos agreed that generative AI stands to play a massive role in improving learner engagement. On one hand, it can help users find the most relevant content for them and personalize courses. But it can also make immersive tech like VR headsets more effective down the line.
“It can actually start to make dynamic, realistic environments where it feels like a human experience and the pathways that you go down could change based on your choices and your decisions,” Lind said. “ Before you would have had to program all that stuff in.”
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Winning Back Learners
AI or not, there are practical ways to keep virtual learning engaging.
Lind recommends employers avoid wasting time on knowledge transfer when bringing people together virtually. “I have a standing rule with my staff that we better not be delivering information [during live sessions] at all. If we need to give people information, let's create it in some format that they can consume on their own time and at their own pace,” he said.
Instead, their live sessions are focused around “doing things that only you can uniquely do when people are working together live, like problem solving, discussion and collaborating.”
Ramos stressed the importance of keeping lessons short and digestible and building in breaks.
Ultimately, it isn’t necessarily the screen that’s driving disengagement. “Nobody ever thinks, ‘it was so exhausting having this really engaging discussion where we were problem solving and working through stuff,’” Lind said. “What people get fatigued from is just sitting there trying to stay awake while multitasking.”
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A Measurement Problem
Despite the clear need for improvement within virtual learning, Lind doesn’t believe the situation is as dire as some L&D practitioners assume. Instead, he recommends employers take a look at how they measure success.
“If 100% completion is your measure of engagement, then you will always fail because people don't need 100% of what you create,” he said. “But if you ask whether people got what they needed out of this, you might find there's actually a high level of engagement.”
Simply put: leaders need to focus more on the outcomes they’re seeing from virtual learning offerings than on a narrow definition of engagement.
“The problem is we tend to design things to force everyone through all of it, which is a terrible experience for anybody,” Lind said.
