There’s been a lot of interest about online training for work for quite some time, and of course that interest has increased recently due to COVID-19.

In this webinar, we’ll give you some tips for making the shift to online training quickly but still effectively. In particular, we’ll discuss:

• What is online training?
• What are some benefits of online training?
• Does online training work?
• Using blended learning
• Tips for specific different types of online training activity types
• Tips for getting started with online training now

We wish you luck if you’re either making the initial move to online training or if you’re maybe looking to add more online training to what you’re currently doing. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help you out.

In addition to this webinar, we’ve been writing articles and holding recorded discussions with online training experts to get you some additional useful tips. We’ve listed those below:

• What Is Online Learning and How to Do It Quickly
• Best Practices for Creating eLearning During the Pandemic
• Transitioning Instructor-Led Training to Live Online Learning 
• Creating Performance Support While Converting ILT to Online Learning 
• Three Uses for Microlearning at Work 
• How to Use Live Online Learning (Webinars and Virtual Classrooms) 

If you want some more detailed information for training in different contexts, you might also find these recorded webinars helpful:

• Selecting Online Safety Training
• Selecting Online Manufacturing Training
• Organizational Learning, Maintainability & Continuous Improvement 

And finally, you might find these more in-depth free guides helpful:

• Selecting Online Safety Training 
• Selecting Online Manufacturing Training 
• Selecting Online Maintenance Training 
• Selecting Online Facilities Maintenance Training
• Online Contractor Orientation Buyer’s Guide 

Hope you find this stuff helpful! Good luck and stay safe.

 

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We wanted to learn more about how people learn so we could also learn more about how to create better training and do other things to facilitate that learning at our workplaces more effectively.

So who better to talk with than Julie Dirsken, author of Design for How People Learn and all-around well-informed person on issues related to learning?

Check out the interview with Julie yourself to begin learning about learning. We’re very grateful to Julie for joining us and sharing her knowledge on the topic, we hope to have her back for some follow-up discussions, and we encourage you to buy a copy of her book and read it (see the link below).

Here are some relevant links:

• Julie’s book Design for How People Learn 
• Julie’s Usable Learning website
• The Reading List and Behavior Change Resources List at Usable Learning that Julie mentioned in the discussion
• The COM-B (capability, opportunity, motivation, and behavior) Behavior Change Wheel Julie mentioned
• The cynefin framework for decision-making Julie mentioned
• An interesting discussion with Julie on behavior change

Thanks again to Julie!

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It’s often, if not always, a good idea to provide some form of test or assessment after providing job training to employees.

In some cases, this may be a written test scored in a pass/fail manner, and in others, it may be a performance test that requires the workers to demonstrate a skill or the ability to perform a procedure in a satisfactory manner before they go back and perform that skill for real on the job.

In either case, it’s important for that test to be a good one. And by “good,” we mean that it provides you with useful, actionable information about whether or not the employee has truly benefited from the training, can satisfy your learning objectives, and is ready and able to successfully apply the new information or perform the new skill on the job.

Side note: Tests are also beneficial for compliance reasons, to prove the worker understood the training, and also because tests have been proven again and again to improve comprehension and retention (see this article on the “testing effect” for more on this).

There are a number of characteristics that “good tests” like this share. Learning & development experts know the two that we’ll talk about in this article as validity and reliability. Read on to learn more about what a valid and reliable test is and why it’s important to create valid and reliable assessments.

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An important part of designing, creating, and delivering job training materials is creating learning assessments–the test at the end of the training activity to determine if workers can perform the skill or skills required by the learning objective.

That test can come in many different forms, including performance demonstrations and, often in the world of online learning, multiple-choice questions.

Whatever type of test it is, you may sometimes find yourself wondering about the best practices for creating the test or assessment that employees must complete after training and before they perform the tasks for real on the job.

In this article, we’re going to give you tips about something related to test creation that learning experts call fidelity (no, not THAT fidelity–this is not a juicy blog post). In training talk, fidelity is the extent to which your test or test question mirrors the real task your workers will have to perform on the job.

In describing fidelity and tests, we’ll cover a few other best practices, too. Hope this helps you with your question writin’.

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