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Are they actually learning anything? | |
After all that effort designing a high quality, participative training course with clear aims and learning objectives, coming up with interesting ways to keep the learners engaged, you should think about measuring your success.
Your first success criteria are the specified Learning Objectives, so obviously you need to make sure that those are met, but there are probably other things that come up during the course that you also want to make sure that the learners have gathered. How can you do this? Asking questionsDon't wait until the end of a two hour lecture to find out if the participants have picked up the gems of knowledge that you have shared, do it as you go. Its the easiest way to break up a lecture, and a great way to re-engage the learners, just before the 20 minute deadline strikes! Some dos and donts:
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Built-in success factorsWhenever you can, take the opportunity to 'build-in' points where you can check attendees' learning; this might be in the form of staging the course, so they can't pass through to the next stage until they have completed the previous one, or it might be a simple discussion to make sure everyone has taken on what they should have by that point. Use your imagination, but do make sure that you have checked. QuizWe already mentioned this as a training method in itself, but its also useful to gain an undertanding of attendees' knowledge level. It gives you the opportunity to identify and to follow up on any points that may not have been clear during the course. One nice option is to split into teams and each team asks the other teams (say) five questions related to the course. The Cocktail PartyThis will heavily depend on the feeling in the room and the group dynamic, but it can be a fun way to wrap up, and could be done during a coffee break. Everyone stands up and 'mingles', and each person has to tell every other person one or two things they have learned during the course, and the other person can ask questions about those topics. This lasts for two minutes, and they move on with the next person and repeat. The secret is that this is a form of 'learning by teaching others' and is a very powerful way to reinforce that knowledge, highlight areas which the learner might need to brush up on in an informal non-threatening way. Feedback FormThis is the most basic way of finding out if your audience has left with a sense of achievement or dissappointment. Beware though, these forms are nicknamed 'Happy Sheets' because they are given out at the end of a course and most people are pretty happy about that, because they got free sandwiches and a day out of the office. Don't rely on the idea that the feedback you get from these forms will inform the further development of the course. Kirkpatrick Level 2You can google for this if you like, but its basically a ~3 month follow-up call to see if the things that the attendees learned are still applicable and used. The idea is that after three months, enough time has passed so that the training should have had some effect on behaviour or the knowledge gap should have been filled, but not so much time that the learner has forgotten it. If there was a specific follow-up activity (e.g. connecting to service X) which should have been done by now, it is highly recommended to make this extra effort, as it might highlight specific reasons why the activity wasn't done, and give you ideas on how to solve that problem. A secondary effect of the follow-up call is that it will spur some of the attendees to recap on their learning or to actually do that follow-up activity, so make sure that you give them all fair warning (at least a couple of weeks) that the call will be happening. And you may have noticed that we're using the word CALL here. Not email. A call or a Skype, VC or other voice call is exactly 387% more effective and interesting than a survey or an email*. * Scientifically guessed.
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