I had a staff member come in yesterday almost in tears to my office so upset and scared about having to do training online this year for our annual core curriculum. This particular person is a friend of mine so I sat her down in my desk and slowly started walking her through all the steps piece by piece. I said as much as I could to encourage her. Let her know her frustrations weren’t only hers and that others new to this process where finding it challenging as well. She thought because it was taking her a long time to do that she must be doing something wrong. So more words of encouragement that everyone will do this at a different pace seemed to help some as well.
An enormous discouragement to her was that if she couldn’t get it done all at once she would lose all the work she had started in the elearning courses. So misinformation from other users was scaring her and increasing her apprehension as well. Once I showed her how she could go in and out as many times as she wanted to and still pick up where she left off, she was more relieved, but still some how skeptical. She still seemed to believe her colleague over me, the so called expert. I also made sure to show her how she could navigate back and forth and all through the course at her own will. I explained how the course was still very “open booked” and that she could look at a quiz question and then refer back to the material any time.
When I left work yesterday she seemed to be working along at the course comfortably, but I will be extremely interested to hear her opinion today of the process and whether she is still as intimidated as yesterday.
I’m curious how you help and guide others that are scared to begin using elearning? Any thoughts or ideas? Please share.
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Along these lines, we ran a “hosted” elearning class for people who were new to elearning or nervous about how it worked. So it was pretty much a classroom course, except everyone did elearning instead of listening to a trainer. Everyone got as much individual help/assistance as they needed & could then go on to explore other elearning courses by themselves.
Hi Tracy, first off, thanks for sharing your thoughts, it always amazes me that we continue to relentlessly blog with very little by way of reinforcement from folk commenting, even if its just I short one like – good point, yes I agree or whatever. Anyway, you have shared some interesting thoughts and they deserve some comment, so here goes on this item –
1. Offer to sit with a person (or have some mentors who will) the first time they log in/set up their account/ use an elearning module.
2.Have some detailed step by step instructions with illustrations laminated and put on the wall in front of the computers that are used for elearning. Email the same to all learners.
3. Develop an elearning module/slide presentation that introduces users to the controls used, interactivity, quiz types etc.
I am sure other readers could come up with more.
Kind regards,
Allan
(see my blogs at http://www.leadingedgetraining.co.nz) 🙂