When it comes to learning, the teaching method is often just as important as the message. Teaching seeks to foster change, which is only possible when your learners truly connect with the subject matter. Forging that connection means providing learners with experiences relevant to their needs. Of course, organizations have their own priorities that must also be addressed. Blended learning can help you strike a balance between the needs of both through learning journeys that are highly flexible and engaging.
What Is Blended Learning?
Blended learning is an approach that combines both online and face-to-face learning in ways that complement and reinforce each other. A blended learning journey is the perfect way to ignite curiosity, drive engagement, and prioritize the needs of different types of learners in your organization. Learning blends can consist of various activities such as eLearning, animations, podcasts, traditional classroom lecturing, roleplays, digital interactive scenarios, video dramas, digital games, and augmented or virtual reality sessions. Here is an example of what a potential learning journey might look like:
What Are the Benefits of Blended Learning?
Blended Learning Prioritizes Your Learners’ Needs
Learners today are incredibly time-poor, making it challenging to create content that can be delivered in their daily workflow. When designing blended learning journeys, you can maximize limited training time by creating activities that can be consumed at any time and anywhere. Here are a few examples:
- Make your learning as accessible as possible through a variety of devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones.
- Activities such as podcasts, games, and videos can be consumed while traveling or on the way to work.
- Microlearning courses can be completed in a matter of minutes, making them easy to do during normal work hours.
Blended learning journeys can help serve the needs of a diverse workplace through personalized learning paths. Incorporating branching pathways or a choice of activities enables learners to pursue a path that reflects their specific role and region, while meeting their personal learning needs and preferences.
Blended Learning Accommodates the Needs of the Organization
Delivering Learning That’s Efficient and Cost-Effective
Blended curriculums offer you more choices regarding how key learning is delivered. Imagine you need to train your employees on a complex new process, and are considering either three half-day classroom sessions, or a series of online explainer videos.
Online videos are more flexible and cost-effective, but they won’t provide employees with the opportunity to ask questions and collaborate with peers the way a live training session does. A blended approach, consisting of an in-person session combined with supporting online resources can be both cost-effective and impactful.
Learning Blends Can Be Adapted During Times of Change
Big unpredictable changes, such as our experience during Covid-19, can rapidly change the way an organization does business. To remain competitive, it is crucial for a business to be adaptable in its methods, technologies, and its training. If your learning is made up of multiple formats, you will be able to continue using some of them during significant disruptions, while reworking others to fit in the new changed environment.
Additionally, a well-designed blend makes it easier to integrate new ideas, approaches, and technologies. For example, incorporating AI into an existing 60-minute eLearning course would be difficult to accomplish; however, enhancing an existing blend with a chatbot to help learners navigate the material is much easier to do.
Blended Learning Maximizes Engagement and Retention
Stimulating Different Senses
Blended learning has tremendous value because the brain processes different kinds of information in different ways. Learning journeys are constructed using a combination of activities that target these different areas. For example:
Raising Learner Retention
It is important to remember that all learning content is competing for your audience’s attention. At any given moment, your employees will be juggling a combination of work responsibilities, personal problems, and distractions.
If your content isn’t interesting or entertaining it will fail to engage your audience. A blended learning strategy offers learners something varied, stimulating, and interesting that does not ask them to absorb all the material in one session or in one way. Not only does this make learning sessions more interesting to learners, but it greatly enhances their ability to retain what they have learned.
Incorporating Spaced Practice
Even if your learners are highly focused and motivated, they’re still subject to the forgetting curve. Research shows that people forget approximately 50 percent of new information after one hour. Within 24 hours, that jumps to 70 percent, and within one week it becomes 90 percent.
The spaced repetition or distributed practice approach has learners revisit information at repeated intervals. For instance, you might use a short initial learning session to introduce the information, then follow that up with a series of interventions that test learners’ recall of what they’ve learned, refresh their understanding, and incorporate additional information.
Spaced learning has been shown to be effective at improving long-term retention. If you want learners to attain deep understanding of material, remember it over time, and be able to apply it in different circumstances, have them revisit key concepts in their learning journeys.
Blended Learning Journeys Can Transform Your Organization
Blended learning offers many benefits for your learners and organization. Consistent, ongoing learning not only reinforces critical job skills but provides a valuable first step in creating a continuous learning culture. Once you have established learning journeys in your organization, continue to introduce new learning in the form of reskilling, upskilling, and employee development initiatives. This will make employees feel more valuable and enable your organization to become more flexible by creating an environment in which change becomes a path to improvement rather than a disruption to be feared.
Learn more about how to create a blended learning program in our eBook Making Blended Learning Work.
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