Schools and businesses alike are having to move their in-person classrooms and training programs online. This has created new challenges for them as well as for companies in the ed-tech space. Perhaps more importantly, students of all ages are having to make significant adjustments as they are having to move from the classroom to their homes.
As these changes are dealt with all around, one thing is clear. It's important to ensure that online education has the same outcomes as classroom-based education. That means taking into consideration both technical and non-technical factors. Here are a few things to consider whether you are an educator, facilitator, student, or in charge of training initiatives for your company.
Establish a Technology Baseline
If you’re working with remote learners, you’ll need to help them be certain they have the technology they need. Work with your LMS provider, IT department, and others to determine basic hardware, software, operating system, and OS requirements for trainees. Then, determine whether your online courses will work for mobile devices or not.
Once they know what they will need, students can determine if their personal technology stacks are adequate. Then, they can work with IT staff to manage any upgrades they might need.
Make Sure Your LMS Works for You
A learning management system (LMS) is the software solution that you used to deliver your course materials. As you can imagine, this is a very broad term. You may see LMS used to describe an online course provider, a software package that you purchase or subscribe to, or an internal system that you develop with the help of a skilled team of software developers and designers.
The best way to get started here is to work with trainers, students, and other stakeholders to create a list of desired features. After that, you can determine if a shrink-wrapped solution will work for you, or if you need a customized LMS.
Seek Feedback on UX
It’s fairly unlikely that the solution you find will meet all users’ needs on the first iteration. That’s why it’s important that you seek feedback from trainers and students. Poll them asking questions such as:
- Were you able to understand the instructor and complete the exercises?
- Did you find that the assessments provided good information on student progress?
- Was the interface easy to navigate?
- Were the learning objectives clear?
- Did you find the course interesting and engaging?
- Have you gained the competencies you wanted to?
- Was the teacher’s delivery method helpful?
When you get the answers to these questions, you can determine which changes need to be made to the technology and instructional methods used.
Set Clear Deadlines and Communication Standards
It isn’t just your delivery of instruction that changes when you move to online education. The way that you and your students communicate and collaborate is changed as well. There will be a lot of things to consider as you make the adjustment.
First, what technology will you use to communicate with one another? Will you need to share videos? What about Zoom meetings or Skype sessions?
Once you’ve chosen the technologies to fit your needs, it will be time to set some guidelines. For example, will you need to have a mandatory, weekly check-in? What about communicating deadlines? You may find that you need to be a bit more explicit now.
Consider Accessibility and New Technologies
With students learning remotely, every good educator must consider accessibility. It’s imperative that you ensure that students and employees can equally access the materials they need to learn what they need to.
As you consider this, you might also consider other roadblocks that learners might face. For example, you might have students who aren’t able to reliably connect to the internet from home, or who have to share devices with other family members.
Once you determine what your students’ need, you can begin exploring technologies that can help. Many LMS systems are designed to help with built-in accessibility functions. You may also be able to help students overcome any obstacles by providing devices to use, or Wi-Fi hotspots.
Improve Self-Paced Learning and Online Libraries
Now is the perfect time to build on and improve your self-paced courses, and your online knowledge base. Both of these will allow your students/trainees to learn independently. This could fill in some gaps for you if you haven’t fully prepared for online learning.
For self-paced learning, instructors can pre-record lectures and seminars, you may also be able to use open-source courses from third party providers. For your own online libraries, you’ll need to make some decisions. First, how and where will you store the information? Also, how will you keep the information secure? You’ll also need to consider what methods your workers will use to access the information, and how to keep it updated?
Final Thoughts: Know When to Postpone Rather Than Convert
Recent events have made it so students, educators, workers, and trainers have had to make some significant adjustments. Brainberry developers and designers are available to help you create online learning options that work for you. However, in some cases, you may decide that certain learning initiatives are better left on hold until you are able to restart in-class instruction.