During the COVID-19 pandemic, we adapted to various forms of online training—some recorded, some text-based, and others live. Despite this shift, many organizations continue to favor in-person training sessions over online options, even live ones. What accounts for this preference?
Online learning offers numerous advantages, including:
- Accessibility and Flexibility: Learners can engage with content anytime and anywhere, breaking it into manageable segments that fit individual schedules. This mode is particularly beneficial for those facing geographic, physical, or time constraints that hinder attendance at in-person sessions.
- Low Administrative Costs: Learning platforms are generally easy to manage, requiring minimal human interaction beyond the learners themselves.
- Scalability: Whether serving one person or a thousand, the effort remains similar if the course is already prepared. (How platforms or institutions charge users is a separate issue.)
- Customizability: Various modules can be tailored to meet the specific needs of learners or client organizations.
- Self-Paced Learning: Learners can progress at their own speed, spending more time on challenging topics while moving quickly through areas they grasp easily.
- Data Tracking and Analytics: Online platforms often provide robust analytics to monitor learner progress and engagement, helping organizations assess program effectiveness and inform future training needs.
These benefits have prompted many organizations to expand their online training offerings, even after the pandemic. However, it’s essential to recognize that each training mode has its strengths and limitations. I believe online learning is particularly effective for:
- Knowledge and Skills Enhancement: Ideal for updating or acquiring technical skills, compliance knowledge, or product information, where the primary goal is information dissemination.
- Onboarding Programs: New employee orientation can be streamlined through online platforms, allowing new hires to learn at their own pace without waiting for a critical mass of new employees.
- Certain Soft Skills Training: Skills such as presentation, communication, and teamwork can be effectively taught online, provided the content is primarily skill-focused.
While online programs offer many advantages, the challenges businesses face today extend beyond mere knowledge acquisition. Apart from the consideration of providing better opportunities for social bonding, networking, and learning engagement, a key reason is the need for deeper changes. Effective change involves shifts in values and beliefs, which can only be fostered by a trainer who can meaningfully influence learners’ mindsets.
Well-designed experiences, anecdotes, structured conversations, and even the timing of communication are critical in this reprogramming process. Achieving substantial change requires sufficient personal attention to learners. Live online sessions often fall short in this regard, especially compared to in-person interactions.
By managing interactions beyond the training content, a good facilitator can create the conditions conducive to deeper change — through activities, discussions, and inquiries — at the right moments without explicitly stating what learners “should change.”
Many clients have asked why my presentations sometimes appear ambiguous. The answer lies in the principle of providing “just enough” information to guide learners’ thinking in the right direction. In personal development, true learning and transformation occur when individuals navigate from a “fuzzy” zone to uncover key insights on their own.
My consideration is: do you want me to express everything clearly to the logical mind, or create lasting changes through inspiring the heart?