Distant Learning done right!

When the Covid-19 crisis hit, it took the world by storm. Working on an operating nuclear power plant, the critical requirement to protect the core (and the operators) meant an immediate evacuation of all non-critical personnel from the facility. Of course the PMO had a tested protocol for remote working that was planned ahead of the game, but suddenly, our whole project management community of practice was physically scattered in different cities, regions and sometimes even continents, as some colleagues found themselves stranded in their home countries. 

In our early days of remote working, the whole PMO team worked on identifying new means to deliver existing services to a customer base in total disarray, and one of these services is Project Management Capability Building. Among a galaxy of different vehicles for knowledge transfer, our formal training offering was made of various classroom trainings, software simulation workshops, and mentoring programs, and suddenly, we no longer had access to our students, nor to our classrooms. 

We did however have access to new tools, implemented in urgency by our technology partners, with the likes of CISCO Jabber, Microsoft Teams and other Social Squared. The real question was: “how do we use these tools wisely?” Our first action was to revamp our whole lessons plan, review it virtually and through mock runs to ensure it was fit for a delivery through a collaboration platform like Teams. If you ever delivered training, you know already that this would never be enough! 

We encouraged all attendees to enable video during the session to ensure they “stayed engaged”, but this was as much draining the network resources as not delivering the positive impact we expected. Rapidly, this was out of the picture. Thankfully, our instructors sharpened their verbal communication skills through months of public speaking sessions in our corporate Toastmasters Club. This, and an intricate knowledge of the principles of adult learning helped us move in the right direction with general questioning, and directed questioning. But it was still too cumbersome for the instructor to deliver his presentation, interact with the system (red pointer, highlighter, etc.) and pay attention to the chatroom where attendees would ask their questions once we realized the vocal questions were too disruptive! 

Here was the first element of our lockdown genius idea: if one brain, one set of eyes, and one set of hands was not enough, we would double that. Now, we had a workable solution to maintain engagement: one instructor focusing on delivering the lessons plan and another instructor focusing on chatroom questions from the students! But this was still too unpredictable for us. We restructured the lessons plan so that suitable slots were factored in for moderated Q&A sessions in between the learning points, and we added another tool in the mix that had proven extremely helpful in engaging an audience (either virtually, or physically): Mentimeter. 

Now we have a full-fledged new way of delivering classroom training. The instructor delivers a learning point, keeping students engaged with direct questions; and at set times, the Moderator seamlessly shares his screen and engages all students in a “classroom activity” with real-time results displayed through Mentimeter, handing back the class to the instructor, and so on. The feedback has been so overwhelmingly positive that some of these recipes for distant learning will surely survive even once the lockdown is over!