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Category: Virtual Training

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Hybrid work remote work Virtual Training

5 Essential Tools You Need For Effective Virtual Instructor-Led Training

Online learning isn’t just an alternative option to face-to-face training—it’s become the backbone of employee training and development. With remote, hybrid, and distributed work models cemented into many organizations, there is an increasing demand for powerful virtual training tools that can provide just as high of a return on your investment as in-person training. Dive into this exploration of five essential tools that promise to transform your Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) sessions, maximizing engagement, productivity, and impact.

1. Interactive Whiteboards

Interactive whiteboards are indispensable for VILT, enabling instructors to present ideas and concepts visually and interactively. Tools like Miro or Whiteboard by Frameable allow participants to contribute in real-time, fostering a collaborative space where ideas can flourish and group thinking can affect productive learning. Whether mapping out timelines, drawing diagrams, or brainstorming with sticky notes, these whiteboards make virtual training sessions more tactile and engaging, helping participants feel connected despite the physical distance.

2. Polling and Quiz Tools

To keep participants active and engaged, incorporating interactive elements like polls and quizzes is an easy and quick solution to shake up any lesson. Tools like Kahoot! and Poll Everywhere facilitate real-time interaction, providing instant feedback to trainers and learners alike. These tools are fantastic for breaking up longer sessions, assessing knowledge retention, and encouraging participation, making learning both interactive and effective.

3. Digital Breakout Rooms

Platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams all offer digital breakout rooms, a crucial feature for successful VILT. These rooms allow participants to work in smaller groups on exercises or discussions, allowing training to function as it does in a classroom setting. Breakout rooms are perfect for small group discussions, working sessions, and teamwork exercises, helping to break the monotony of longer training sessions and ensuring that every participant can contribute meaningfully. For the most effective breakout sessions, try Overview by Frameable, which offers a single view of all concurrent training sessions in real time. It allows trainees to join the right sessions at the right time. It even allows trainers to easily host office hours so that any questions get answered promptly as they come up.

4. Multiple Screen Sharing

If your organization uses Microsoft Teams (and a whopping one million organizations do), you may have noticed the limitation in sharing multiple screens simultaneously during video conferencing. Yet, the ability to share multiple screens simultaneously is essential for effective collaborative training sessions. MultiShare by Frameable allows participants to share multiple screens in a Microsoft Teams call. Multishare is a tool that enables instructors to monitor the learning process effectively. With the capability to view all trainees’ screens simultaneously, instructors can effortlessly track progress and quickly identify areas where trainees may be facing challenges. This real-time oversight allows for immediate intervention and support, ensuring that no one falls behind during the session.

5. Asynchronous Learning Platforms

Not everyone learns at the same pace, and sometimes it’s impossible to coordinate a training time with a dispersed, global team. Having on-demand or recorded training sessions allows trainees to refresh and absorb all of the content at a pace that works best for them. Asynchronous tools such as Loom or Frame.io complement live training sessions by allowing participants to access pre-recorded videos, readings, and exercises at their convenience. These platforms empower trainees to review content at their own pace, which is particularly beneficial for reinforcing learning or accommodating different time zones.

Integration and Implementation:

Implementing new tools often causes a lot of complications and looping in internal technology teams to help with accessing your organization’s infrastructure. It’s essential to both identify the tools that work best for your training sessions and also integrate them with existing systems. To make it easy on trainers and organizations, consider solutions that are already available inside of the tools your organization uses, or explore add-ons that enhance existing functionality. Using familiar tools means your teams won’t have to spend more time getting acquainted with a new system before they can start learning.

The Future of VILT in Microsoft Teams

Virtual instructor-led training doesn’t have to be a second-best alternative to face-to-face interactions. With the right tools, VILT can be just as engaging, interactive, and effective in Microsoft Teams. Ready to transform your virtual training sessions in Microsoft Teams? Discover how Frameable can elevate your VILT experience. Whether you’re looking to foster better visibility, encourage spontaneous collaboration, or simply make your training sessions more engaging, Frameable has you covered for virtual training.

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Future of work productivity remote work Virtual Training

Mastering Engagement in Virtual Training: Key Strategies for Success

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

Organizations that want to retain top talent and stay ahead of the curve know that remote and hybrid work arrangements are critical to their success. This crucial realization also comes with a new need: providing new hires, current employees, and potentially many others with an effective and engaging path to getting trained on company policies and procedures, professional development resources, ongoing learning. Translating an engaging and successful in-person lecture or course into virtual content, live or otherwise, is not necessarily a straightforward path, especially if you want to ensure trainees leave having had a high-quality experience.

Understanding the Virtual Training Landscape

The world of virtual training is marked by plenty of ever-changing trends and challenges. But one core issue remains: how to captivate and maintain your audience’s attention in an environment rife with distractions and the temptation to do anything else besides pay attention to the content (like answering emails or scrolling on your phone). Below, we dive into a variety of strategies for virtual training for overcoming these hurdles, so you can transform passive learners into active and engaged participants.

What Makes a Virtual Training Engaging?

There is a difference between adding shocking facts into a training session and providing true value comes down to making your content as relevant to the learner as possible. Think back on your current virtual training set-up and content plan: How can you include new or surprising ways to share the information you need to get across? How can you connect your content to real-world applications that learners will encounter in the workplace and beyond?

When learners are presented with content in a way that makes it easy to absorb and relevant to them, they are more likely to stay focused, engaged, and retain the information you are sharing. This can come in any form of training: live instructor-led sessions, pre-recorded training videos, or interactive quizzes. The crucial element remains the same: make sure your trainees leave the session feeling like what they learned is crucial to their success and relevant to their job. Learners who leave sessions feeling energized and capable are a huge win for trainers and their organization’s bottom line. 

When you start with this approach, instead of repeating the same processes, you’re likely to discover room for improvement in both your content and how you deliver it.

Strategies for Virtual Training Success

The virtual environment requires a new approach to teaching methods. Virtual learning can be uncomfortable or hinder community building without clear instructions due to a lack of established social norms. While some students may feel exceptionally comfortable in a virtual learning environment, not everyone will.

This offers you, the instructor, the opportunity to be exceptionally prescriptive when assigning group projects or having students disperse into virtual breakout rooms during a call. By taking away some of the worry and anxiety that can come from uncertainty, you can better equip your students with the information they need to focus on the task at hand and find the value in what is currently on the docket.

Furthermore, when it comes time to break out into sessions or develop new modules, you will also want to rethink how you disseminate different lessons. Repeating the same slide show and lecture format can become exceptionally arduous in a virtual classroom. While sometimes it is unavoidable, there are other approaches to consider when developing lesson plans that drive better student engagement and participation.

Consider how your team can implement a variety of the following:

  • Personalized learning paths: for small class sizes or one-on-one training, consider spending time getting to know the individual goals of your student or students
  • Gamification of certain modules: Explore Kahoot, Quizlet, and many others that can make learning more fun and aid in content retention.
  • Dynamic, visual content: Instead of classic slideshow presentations explore options such as Prezi for redefining how you develop lectures.
  • Video-based lessons
  • Peer-review assignments

Building Community Through Virtual Training

Community building is essential for sustaining long-term engagement and for creating a sense of belonging. Regular check-ins, group projects, and social forums can help in crafting an inclusive and supportive community. Utilizing approved internal channels or other connection platforms helps to make the learning experience more comprehensive and integrated into participants’ daily lives.

Measuring the Success and ROI of Virtual Training

Measuring the success of virtual training can come in a variety of forms. This can include closing larger sales, reducing turnover, increasing in-house promotions over external new hires, or seeing improvements in your employee satisfaction surveys.

If one of your goals with training is to develop a loyal customer base, great training can help you get there faster. Buyers especially take notice when they have a great experience with your brand. A pleasant experience with a skilled and knowledgeable representative and great support content leads to more closed deals and a higher average sale according to data from Seismic. 

Both employees who represent your company to customers and those with internal roles report higher job satisfaction and likelihood of staying with a job due to consistent and supportive training, according to IBM. For those with a goal of increasing overall employee satisfaction, offering professional development courses, trainings, and opportunities for career advancement are a crucial piece of the puzzle. 

At the end of the day, engaged employees are more likely to benefit your bottom line, and those with the resources to succeed are going to provide more value to both the company and their team. 

Next Steps

The journey from traditional to virtual training environments is complex but rewarding. By implementing the strategies outlined, trainers and HR leaders can foster more engaging, productive, and effective learning experiences. Building connections in virtual settings is not just about technology; it’s about creating an immersive, interactive, and inclusive learning culture that adds value and resonates with participants.

Explore how Frameable can help your team level up virtual training in Microsoft Teams or sign up for a demo today.

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Microsoft Teams remote work Virtual Training

5 Tips for Successful Virtual Instructor-led Training with Microsoft Teams

Remote work and learning have become the new norm with 90% of companies offering some form of digital learning for their employees. Early adopters like IBM reported that employees learned 5 times more content by incorporating virtual training sessions into their programs. As a result, creating an effective virtual instructor-led training (VILT) program has become crucial across industries. With Microsoft Teams being the most common platform for delivering virtual training, making sure you leverage all of its capabilities effectively can mean the difference between an average training lesson and one that is most effective. Here, we outline five essential tips for leveraging Microsoft Teams to conduct successful VILT sessions, ensuring that your training leads to effective learning outcomes and more productive workers.

Understanding the Importance of Engaging VILT

Along with the shift to remote work, there has been a growing body of research supporting the effectiveness of well-designed virtual training programs. For instance, a study by the IBM Smarter Workforce Institute found that participants in virtual classrooms outperform traditional face-to-face learners in knowledge retention and application when the training is engaging and interactive. Engaging VILT sessions not only facilitate better learning outcomes but also contributes to higher job satisfaction and productivity among employees.

Leveraging Microsoft Teams for VILT

Microsoft Teams offers a rich set of features that can be leveraged to create interactive and engaging VILT sessions. Here are some tips for corporate trainers to make the most of Microsoft Teams:

1. Maximize Engagement with Interactive Tools

Engagement is the lifeblood of effective learning. Microsoft Teams offers a plethora of interactive tools like polls, quizzes, and surveys through integrated apps such as Microsoft Forms. Trainers can make the learning process active and participatory by using these tools in VILT sessions. For example, interactive polls can be used to gauge learners’ opinions or knowledge on a subject at the beginning of a session, setting the stage for a tailored learning experience. These interactive tools not only break the monotony of traditional lecture-based learning but also encourage trainees to think critically and engage more deeply with the content. 

2. Utilize Breakout Rooms for Personalized Learning Experiences

Breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams allow trainers to divide participants into smaller groups for discussions, workshops, or role-playing exercises. This personalized approach not only enhances learning by allowing for more in-depth exploration of topics but also encourages collaboration among participants. Research from the Harvard Business Review supports the idea that small group learning leads to a 55% improvement in learning application over traditional lecture-based training.

3. Incorporate a Mix of Media and Content Types

Diversifying the types of content used in training sessions can cater to different learning styles and keep participants engaged. Incorporate videos, infographics, and interactive content like digital whiteboards to help boost retention rates. This approach is not merely a nod to the variety in learning styles but a powerful method to ensure that all participants remain engaged and can absorb information in ways that suit them best. 

4. Leverage the Power of Asynchronous Learning

Not all learning needs to happen in real-time. Microsoft Teams allows for the creation of dedicated channels for ongoing discussions, resource sharing, and asynchronous learning activities. Trainers can even record the training sessions and offer them on-demand. This approach not only accommodates different time zones and schedules but also encourages continuous learning beyond the confines of scheduled training sessions.

5. Provide Immediate Feedback and Support

Feedback plays an integral role in the learning process. In the context of VILT, leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Teams to provide real-time feedback and support becomes a game-changer. The platform’s instant messaging and meeting features facilitate a direct and immediate line of communication between trainers and trainees, enabling a dynamic exchange of feedback that can significantly enhance the learning experience.

The immediacy of response serves various purposes during training sessions. Firstly, it enables trainers to keep track of the progress and level of comprehension of trainees. Secondly, it facilitates the prompt correction of any misunderstandings or misconceptions, ensuring that trainees are on the right track. Moreover, real-time feedback creates a supportive and interactive learning environment where trainees can gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

Solutions to Uplevel Microsoft Teams for VILT

While Microsoft Teams provides a solid foundation for VILT, exploring advanced platforms like Frameable Core can take your training programs to the next level. Frameable offers tailored solutions that enhance VILT engagement, interactivity, and the overall learning experience. Features like multiple simultaneous screen shares and digital whiteboards allow trainers and trainees to experience highly collaborative sessions. With its intuitive design and specialized features for virtual learning, Frameable addresses the nuanced needs of modern corporate training programs.

Explore Frameable for Effective Virtual Instructor-led Training Solutions

In today’s fast-paced corporate world, delivering engaging and effective virtual instructor-led training is more important than ever. By leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Teams and embracing innovative platforms like Frameable, you can ensure that your training programs are not just educational but truly transformative. Engaging VILT sessions are the key to unlocking effective learning outcomes and fostering more productive, knowledgeable workers.

Dive deeper into how Frameable can revolutionize your virtual training programs and embrace the future of corporate training today with engaging virtual learning experiences.

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