A lot of money and time is invested into creating impactful training, and the ultimate aim of these trainings is to make learning exciting enough in order to become a lifelong pursuit for learners. There are various ways of achieving this goal, and in this post, eLearning Industry is taking on blended learning approaches.

Blended Learning for text-heavy courses:

Much of the corporate trainings are content heavy, in order to share all the information needed by the employees. This approach fails to create interest in learning, as most employees don’t read through all of the materials, which often shows in the quality of their work. How to face this issue with a blended learning approach?

• Create a learning management system to show schedules and timelines to the learners, that helps them how to proceed through the material
• Track their performance: are they keeping the deadlines with each course?
• Provide sessions where experts of certain fields help learners to better understand each topic. Keep track of how much information each learner has gained by self-paced learning?
• Create online chat rooms or forums where learners can gather into groups and interact on the subject materials, and discuss problems or doubts. Finding the right answer together can help to breathe more life into a content-heavy course.

Blended approach for soft-skills trainings:

Soft skills and personal development trainings are best suited for a classroom, but no matter how impactful an instructor is in the class, a lot of what is though is lost with time. There is a need for continuous re-enforcement, which often challenges the classroom-only approaches. How to utilize blended learning for soft skill trainings?

• Break down training sessions into small formats to help quick processing of the information, keep language simple and present content in bullet-points.
• Short formats provide easier understanding of things as it does not require such an intense concentration.
• Make subject materials available online, so that learners can access it on-demand anytime, anywhere.
• Bonus tip: use situational exercises, like simulations, in order to show and develop soft skills of the learners.

Blended learning to technical courses:

Technical courses are often the most-wanted courses, with a wide range of technological extensions attached to its curriculums. Take an example of a software used by employees, but this software is continuously upgraded to newer and newer versions. How do you make sure that employees are keeping up-to-date?

• Keep the length of online courses short, and outline major changes in the software changes and their implications – introduce the basics of the newer version.
• Keep previous versions’ details accessible in the background to make it an optional material.
• Keep the details for an instructor-led session. This way learners can create the knowledge foundation in an online course, and extend their knowledge with an instructor.
• If your learner group is busy and used to self-paced learning, this method will work very well. They could read the basics as per their own convenience, and they took time out only for the scheduled instructor-led sessions.
• Therefore, instructor-led sessions were better in quality and more efficient, as learners arrived well-prepared with the basics.

This model is simple, therefore perfect for short technical courses and can be very easily implemented across similar trainings.

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Keywords: blended learning, elearning, online learning, corporate training, blended learning solutions, learning and development, best practices.

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