Recently I was facilitating a session and a participant asked: “Do you have any advice for someone who wants to convert ILT to eLearning?”
Start at the Beginning: Accurate Learning Objectives
Good training design always begins with learning objectives – what should someone be able to do new or different or better after the learning experience – regardless of whether it’s ILT (instructor-led training) or eLearning?
Making sure those objectives are well-crafted is important, but it’s not the only thing.
Accountability to the Learning Objectives
The next important question is: how will you hold yourself and your learners accountable for meeting those objectives online?
The in-person environment is simply different than the online environment, and even if you have a highly successful training program that is currently delivered in-person it doesn’t mean it will be successful online.
When you’re in-person, you can see body language, you can more easily interpret someone’s tone, you can break people up into small groups to have discussions and you can bring people to the front of the room to role play. People can raise their hand and interrupt at any time in order to ask questions. It’s just different.
Question to Ask When Planning to Convert ILT to eLearning
Some questions to begin asking as you look to bring a program from in-person to online delivery are:
- Why do you plan to convert ILT to eLearning?
- If you’re looking to scale a learning program, then how will more learners impact your objectives, learning outcomes and what might you need to adjust in order to effectively meet the needs of more learners, possibly across various cultures?
- Will “online” mean synchronous instructor-led delivery (like a webinar), asynchronous self-paced delivery (like an eLearning module) or a multi-week instructor-led asynchronous course (like a MOOC)?
- What engagement strategies did you use for in-person delivery and which (if any) of those strategies can be replicated online?
- Which components of the in-person program need to be re-written to better align with online delivery?
- What will the technology and platform allow for when it comes to interactions and learner participation?
- What advantages do you have with online delivery that you didn’t have with in-person delivery? (For example, online delivery may allow for branching scenarios that can be more tightly controlled than in-person role-play activities.)
Next Steps to Convert ILT to eLearning
Once you have some thoughts on these questions, it’s time to craft specific engagement strategies that are tied to your objectives. Use this list of engagement strategies for webinars, eLearning, and other online methods to get you started and start working in a storyboard structure to organize your ideas.
If you’ve converted ILT to eLearning, what are some things you needed to keep in mind? I’d love to hear your insights in the comment section. Or perhaps you have a question about converting from in-person to online delivery – post your questions in the comment section as well.
