Thirteen months ago, I was sitting at my desk, looking at my diary. It was empty. In the weeks following the announcement of the first lockdown here in the UK, with the inevitability of a teetering house of cards, each of our clients cancelled the work that we had booked with them. Hello reinvention my old friend.As the dust was settling on the crossed-out entries in our schedule, a question emerged: “What if we’re never able to deliver in-person training ever again?” Alarming, certainly. But also a playful provocation, an invitation for exploration. After all, we certainly had the time available to investigate.
So began the evolution of what we now loosely term ‘hybrid learning’.
Dr Katie Martin has written extensively about the power of ‘what if’ questions and our ‘what if’ certainly proved to pack quite a punch. Imagine a vertical stack of 8 hours, like a block of flats on the horizon. That’s pretty much what the pre-pandemic training model looked like for us. One day with the participants. Covid effectively knocked this well-worn routine to the ground.
Once we accepted this ‘new reality’ (the first of many over-used phrases we would encounter this past year) we got to posing some practical questions. “What would happen if we take those fallen flats and spread them out along the horizontal timeline? Group them in chunks of two-hour training sessions, which we can deliver by Zoom? Leave enough space between each delivery for participants to practice in a ‘real-life’ context? Build a learning platform to host all of the training material, setting tasks and offering optional extra resources for attendees to explore in their own time?”
By the time May rolled around and the phone started ringing again, we were all set to share our refreshed client proposition. Happily, we had a warm response. ‘I love it, it’s like learning by osmosis’ said one and promptly commissioned our first pilot sessions. With each new programme, we discover more positives to this way of working. It feels like a win-win-win, for our participants, our clients – and for us.
As organisations emerge cautiously out of lockdown and take tentative steps towards a blend of working from both home and office, our hybrid learning model is proving popular. No-one seems to want to return to the old one-day delivery, preferring instead a blend of in-person and virtual learning, spread out across weeks to fit into the flow of participants’ daily work.
We’ve built closer and deeper relationships with both our clients and our participants and the feedback we receive is uniformly enthusiastic. As for my diary? Full-up with a delightful mix of topics and teams from all sorts of organisations. Turns out, hybrid learning might well be the silver lining to our Covid cloud.
@JustinMcCarron
If you’d like to hear more from Justin, or this new way of learning, then why not join our free webinar, ‘Designing a learning experience’ on Thursday 29th April at 5pm. Find out more here.
