Asynchronous Learning vs Synchronous Learning
You will often hear the terms ‘synchronous’, ‘asynchronous’ and ‘blended’ learning used by L&D professionals. These terms sound complex. They’re really not. Let’s demystify them...
What is synchronous learning?
This type of learning takes place with real people in real-time (hence ‘synchronous’). Participants are required to be present – think Zoom webinars, live lectures and video conferences. It allows participants to learn from each other's expertise and perspectives while benefiting from dialogue with the instructor. With a predetermined agenda and time frame, multiple learners can interact in a set place and time.
What is asynchronous learning?
Asynchronous learning takes place on the learner's own time, allowing them to learn at their own pace. To ensure participation, there is usually a set deadline to complete any tasks or evaluations. The asynchronous experience can be facilitated through online courses, independent work, or individual projects. Learners are given more control over the extent and time they participate in a course, which makes it ideal for self-directed learners.
Pros and cons of synchronous learning
Synchronous learning has several benefits:
- Foster a sense of community and encourage peer-to-peer collaboration and personal interaction to help knowledge retention.
- Allows participants to practice new skills in real-time.
- Provides a platform for a feedback loop, from both other learners and instructors.
- Clarifying any enquiries on the spot to help learn better through supportive instruction.
However, there are also some limitations to synchronous learning, such as:
- Difficulty keeping to a shared time, due to busy schedules or other commitments, and end up missing out on important modules.
- The instructor adheres to a common pace, which may not be ideal for slower learners.
- Online sessions can run the risk of technical difficulties. (e.g. spotty internet connection, website crash)
Pros and cons of asynchronous learning
The benefits of asynchronous learning are:
- Provides a great opportunity for those who prefer to learn on their own time with little contact from the instructor.
- Ideal for busy employees who don't have time to attend live sessions.
- Allows for more time for self-reflection and going through the material multiple times.
- Accessible anywhere and anytime, in spite of different time zones or location.
There are also some disadvantages, like:
- Difficult for those who lack self-motivation.
- Lack of feedback and acknowledgement can be an issue for dependent learners.
- No real-time feedback.
Blended learning
Blended learning combines both online and offline learning deliveries, ultimately reaping the benefits of asynchronous and synchronous learning in one experience. Also known as a hybrid learning model, it allows instructors to take into account the personal learning styles and circumstances of each employee to suit their needs. Modules and courses take place both online and offline, asynchronously and synchronously, to create a myriad of instruction that is both engaging and accessible. One prime example that showcases the benefits of this combined approach is when participants are given online course supplies, allowing them to study it beforehand and discuss the material in person.
Final Thoughts
This all correlates with previous thoughts we’ve shared about when to use live instructor-led training and when to use eLearning modules. We just didn’t use fancy language!
Benefits of Starting Your Company's Learning Journey with an Agency
According to research by the Open University, 91% of UK businesses are struggling to find workers with the right skills. So, it’s a no-brainer that strengthening your current employees' skills is the best way to mitigate the lack of strong candidates.
There are many options you can take to address this, this post focuses on working with an outside agency. Agencies have access to resources that individual freelancers and small businesses don’t.
What Are The Benefits of Choosing an eLearning Agency?
- A good learning agency will have everything you need in one place - learning management systems (LMS), content creation, user experience experts, and professional services. You can access the deep expertise of the whole team across every area. By contrast, if you use contractors/freelancers, they tend to either have deep expertise in one particular niche, else be a ‘jack of all trades, master of none'.
- Agencies have ‘been there, done that’ with countless other organisations, many likely similar to you. You gain the benefit of their hard-earned experience and avoid your internal team wasting time reinventing wheels.
- The best agencies are aware of the newest and most effective eLearning and self-paced learning options. Instructional design is a professional skill. You can’t just take a subject matter expert from your organisation and expect them to play this role. Partnering them with a trained instructional designer from an agency will make a huge difference to the quality of the learning you produce.
- Working with technology can be hard. There is a learning curve to gain these skills and then an overhead in maintaining them. Having internal resource putting effort into this will be at the expense of time spent on detailed content. Content is king. Work with a good agency and you can concentrate on the content, and let the agency worry about the technology.
- A great agency will think bigger than the current project. They will support your L&D in building a strategy to use technology to create a great learning culture.
Choosing the right agency is a challenge in itself. At GuyKat we have helped organisations all over the world enjoy these benefits. We’re particularly proud of our work to partner with clients on point number 5 and help them mature their digital learning capability.
10 Ways to Make Your eLearning More Engaging
The best eLearning engages your learners and makes the complex seem simple. It connects your audience with the content and adds excitement to the learning experience. To help you achieve this, here are a handful of eLearning tips from our eLearning team.
Use creative design
It’s essential to use visuals that help to communicate the subject matter and accommodate the learning journey - overcrowded graphics and images can undermine the experience.
Having a bold colour pallet is an eLearning tip that can also make a difference. Colours can also be used to attract your learner’s attention to key information, represent your branding, or categorise the content.
People are drawn to beauty. No matter how serious the subject, the overall experience of a course can always be enhanced by good aesthetic design.
Use multimedia
If you only plan to use graphics and text, you could just share a PowerPoint. Instead, bring your eLearning content to life using multimedia, such as videos, animations or audio. By keeping it relevant and striking the right balance, you can deepen your learner’s experience and understanding of the content.
Make it interactive
Interactivity demands engagement from learners. Done well, it can make the learning experience immersive.
Different interactions can encourage your learners to discover and deepen their understanding. For example, buttons can reveal new information, while interactive scenarios can build an understanding of real-life applications.
The best interactive eLearning is similar to the old 'Choose-your-own-adventure' books*. Every learner will take their own path from start to finish, receive tailored feedback as they progress, but all finish up with the required knowledge at the end.
*Think 'Black mirror: Bandersnatch' if you're of the Netflix generation.
Test your learners
Quizzing and gamification elements can check your learner’s understanding. Providing solid feedback and self-assessment will allow your learners to be active participants. Understanding their strengths and areas for improvement will inform their development. The user interface is as important as the content in getting your learners to explore. Put thought into it.
Related content: Read more about enhancing your learning culture with gamification and rewards.
Encourage your learners to explore
Allow your learners to take the lead and navigate the content. Ensure that the structure of your content flows intuitively and allows them to explore. While you may wish to craft a specific journey, your navigation should not block your learners or hold them back.
Related content: Read more about increasing your learning engagement.
Create a narrative
The best way to engage your learners is to tell a story, rather than simply present information. To learn effectively, your learners need to personally connect with your content and be led on a journey. This is best achieved through skilled writing during the storyboarding phase of a project.
Shout about the benefit to the learner, not your 'learning objectives'
It’s much easier to motivate your learners if they believe the course will benefit them. The course designer needs to be clear on the learning objectives but these are not the same as learner benefits. Identify the learning objectives when creating the storyboard. Everything in the storyboard should help deliver these objectives. But do not list these at the start of the course. It can often turn off the learner. Instead, you should frame the 'What's in it for me?' question to motivate them.
So, don't say "During this course, you will learn the detail of the latest law on data protection, you will learn how it applies to a specific subgroup of our clients and you will learn some changes to how we enter data on the system to ensure compliance." Rather say, "There have been some recent changes in data protection law. There's a real risk that any of us could accidentally do something that could bring the whole company down. We're going to tell you what you need to know and do to make sure that person isn't you!". Now, the learner is listening.
GuyKat Tip: We encourage our clients to outline their learning objectives in their storyboards, either written explicitly in the script or considered as a thread throughout. This is because it’s vital that every element of the storyboard supports your learners in achieving their goals.
Keep it bite-sized
If appropriate, you should try to create eLearning that is bite-sized and has an overarching objective. Smaller chunks of information will be easier for your learners to digest and retain. By focusing clearly on the essential information, you’re more likely to hold your learner’s attention.
Read more: Less Is More: Organising And Reducing Content To Make It Digestible
Know your learners
Above all, your content must be tailored to your specific learners. Different audiences have different needs. For example, a younger audience may respond well to bold graphics and gamification. You need to get to know your learners and create content that is intuitive to their specific needs and is written with the right 'voice'.
Be concise
Make it easy for your learners by presenting information in a clear and simple way. Long or unrelated content can be confusing and distract from key messages.
GuyKat Tip: These tips are especially valuable if you’re making new learning content, using authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate. If the content is vital to your business, you may want to engage professional help rather than building the content yourself.
A Guide to Custom Front-End Development in Docebo
It’s often assumed that good eLearning content is the key to high engagement. But, this doesn’t matter if you can’t find what you’re looking for. At GuyKat, we know that optimising the learner’s journey is just as essential. We design Docebo platforms that encourage learners to immerse themselves in your learning experience and easily discover your courses.
Here’s how we do it.
The User
To optimise the user experience (UX) and get the most out of your content, understanding your user is our first step.
We visualise where you want your learner to go and what you want them to achieve. To fully understand your user journey, we design sitemaps that display where the user can go on each page. After defining this user flow, we create a wireframe to design each page.
This process enables us, and our clients, to refine the user journey and visualise how we can achieve the learner’s goals.
The Design
We design platforms that represent your branding and bring your users back for more. A user interface (UI) should be aesthetic and authentic, facilitating your UX.
By collaborating with our clients, we refine our designs and create the best UI. We incorporate our client’s branding and build on their design visions. Next, we leverage the latest tools to provide mockups of the design that we will build.
The Build
To bring our vision to life, we build the design in your platform and implement the desired features - don’t worry, we keep it hidden from any live users.
The build is tested to ensure a smooth experience for your target learners. At this stage, we encourage our client’s feedback and a soft launch. This involves a small group of test users (not involved in the project) interacting with the platform and us gathering feedback. This gives us insight from a real learner’s perspective.
Related Content: Building a custom Docebo landing page enhances your UX.
Bespoke Software Builds
We also offer bespoke software builds for pages, to enhance the learner’s experience. We utilise Docebo’s powerful API to present data in an optimal way - this can be anything from progress bars to course completion graphs.
Learn more about our System Integration and API Development.
We work efficiently to design an intuitive and engaging platform for your users. By stretching the limits of CSS and Docebo’s API, we bring our client's visions to life and innovate their learning experiences. If you’re looking for high engagement with your eLearning, optimising your learning platform and delivering high-quality content will get you there.
Related Content: How to keep learners coming back to the system.
5 Ways to Build Your Organisation’s Learning Maturity
Last year we launched our Corporate Learning Technology CMM, showing the typical journey organisations go through with learning tech. Some get further along than others. Those that ‘go all the way’ and make best use out of their technology, truly put Learning at the centre of their culture. If you missed it, then you can find out more about our maturity model here https://www.guykat.com/en_us/corporate-learning-technology-model/.
We’ve had a couple of questions about things organisations might do to speed through this journey. Though this isn't a definitive list, here are five things you should think about:
Encourage Participation
The more engaged your learners are, the quicker their development. You need to empower your learners to drive their own growth and motivate them to discover your content.
For example, you could implement:
- Gamification - In Docebo, you can include gaming elements (e.g., competitive point scoring) to engage your learners and encourage them to explore your content.
- Rewards - You could reward your learners for achieving milestones, acknowledging their progress and efforts. Championing their achievements will incentivise their success.
- Self-enrolment - Your learners could have the freedom to enrol on relevant courses that interest them. Give them autonomy and trust them to take initiative in shaping their learning.
Offer Variety
Create an exciting learning environment by offering a variety of delivery methods and experiences. This will broaden your learner’s development prospects and enhance the effectiveness of your learning journeys. If you only offer click-and-read eLearning, your learners will lose interest. Mix it up!
For example, you could offer:
- Blended learning - You could combine a mix of learning approaches to add depth to your learning experience. For example, your online training could complement your instructor-led training (classroom training). This hybrid approach could improve efficiency and give you the best of both worlds.
- Multimedia - Include a variety of relevant media in your content, such as different videos, images, text, interactivity, or animation. Using the right amount of media is more likely to retain your learners’ attention.
- Bespoke eLearning - One of the best ways to engage your learners is by catering to their needs, beyond compliance training. You could partner with a content provider to design bespoke eLearning that represents your branding and subject matter. Increase the value of your content and move away from the basics of off-the-shelf learning.
Tailor the Experience
These days, learners want accessible and convenient digital content that is intuitive to their needs. You should tailor the structure of your content and Learning Platform to suit your learners’ different goals.
For example, you could:
- Create content that is tailored for different paths of career development.
- Utilise learning plans in Docebo to provide relevant development structure and guide your learner throughout their journey.
- Ensure that your content is adaptable and responsive, particularly to different technology devices (like mobile).
Build a Collaborative Culture
Let your learning strategy evolve with your learners. Place learning at the heart of your company by creating a social learning environment. Empower your learners to collaborate with each other, share their knowledge, and contribute to your Learning Platform. This way, they are more likely to feel valued and champion your learning culture.
Benchmark your Progress
Keep track of your learners’ data to continually improve your Learning Platform experience. Decide on your KPIs and other data that you want to capture and benchmark them frequently.
For example, to measure the effectiveness of your Learning Platform you could report:
- The number of self-enrolled learners on your courses.
- Course completion rates.
- Course test results.
Enhance your Learning Culture with Gamification and Rewards
What drives you to learn? Usually, it’s the reward that comes with completing the learning. For example, if you have a new IT system, it’s the need to gain the ability to use it that drives your learning. Take that away and there’s no benefit of gaining that knowledge.
The same drivers apply to organisational learning. Knowing this, we can use gamification and rewards to motivate engagement with learning. Docebo has specific features to help you take advantage of this.
We spoke with GuyKat’s LMS Analyst Jenny Jackson, who shared some thoughts on Gamification and Rewards.
What is Docebo Gamification and Rewards?
You can configure your system so that users can earn both virtual and physical rewards. For instance, your users can earn virtual badges based on the criteria that you define. The more they engage with the system in the way you want them to, the more badges are added to their profile. This can be taken a step further by adding a coin value to each badge. They can then use their accumulated coins to buy physical rewards from your rewards shop. Users can earn badges for completing courses, scoring highly in tests, or using Learn, Coach & Share. For an extra competitive boost, users can be part of the leaderboard or earn bonus badges (and points!) for coming top in contests.
What activities should be rewarded?
Reward the amount of effort for each activity. Create a plan of what activities are worth higher points.
For example:
- Creating and having approved a learning resource in Learn, Coach & Share should award more points than the activity of commenting or asking a question.
Reward with higher points if training is undertaken at a scheduled time.
For example:
- If training is scheduled at a specific time that the user would have to use their free time to attend, that should award significantly more points or higher kudos than training that is ‘on demand’.
What rewards are available?
As a super admin on the Docebo platform, you have access to a Reward shop tool. There are two ways of using the Reward shop:
- Extrinsic: Rewarding learners with tangible goods, so long as you can fulfil them. It could be, for example, a coffee voucher, a T-Shirt, a product or a discount at one of your company’s affiliated stores.
- Intrinsic: If you have a low budget, you might want to consider having a ‘kudos’ based rewards strategy, whereby you make full use of the leaderboards or company communications to shout about your really engaged, high-scoring users.
What are the Leaderboards and Contests?
Leaderboards in Docebo show users' points accumulation against one another.
Contests award a points/badge bonus for the highest scorer of points:
- For the user who completes the most courses.
- For the user who gets the most 'helpful' marked comments in Learn, Coach & Share course forums.
- For the highest scorer in a quiz, within a set timeframe.
It’s possible to set up leaderboards by branches or groups - in this way you could create competition within teams or divisions, or even between parts of a country!
GuyKat tip: We recommend finding a small team to test out your leaderboards and competitions first.
Final thoughts
Before enabling all these features, think about your organisation’s culture. Some workforces respond well to public competitive elements like leaderboards, some don't. Equally, some professionals may find virtual badges gimmicky. You know your organisation best. Tailor the features you use accordingly.
Cost-free ways to level-up your Learning Platform
Building a learning culture at an organisation is a long-term process that requires a lot of brainstorming and resources. Each organisation operates differently, meaning the definition of a ‘Perfect Learning Culture’ will vary. However, there are steps that you can take to head in the right direction. Here are 5 ways to enhance your organisation’s Learning Platform without any incremental costs.
Organise your course catalogues
Let’s put this into perspective. It’s Friday evening and you’re looking forward to watching a sci-fi movie on Netflix. You’re not sure about the movie title but you know that this is the genre you’re craving. You open Netflix and nothing makes sense - there are no categories to organise the content, including genre. Frustration! You can’t find what you’re looking for and call it quits.
It’s the same with Learning Platforms. If your content is unorganised, the learner won’t hesitate to leave your site in protest.
The moral of the story: Allocate time to effectively organise your learning content to increase learner engagement.
Related content: Organise Content to Increase Learner Engagement
Enable Q&A forums
The biggest players in the L&D industry understand the importance of social learning and collaborative organisational structure. In many cases, Q&A forums drive usage of your Learning Platform by building a learning community that collaborates, shares knowledge and seeks support. This is even more important with 80% of office-based learners working from home.
Enable self-enrolling
Offer your learners a sense of autonomy. Give them the green light to act on their own interests by choosing learning courses that they find useful for their development. Autonomy usually results in responsibility, which leads to higher learning outcomes and engagement.
Create training plans
Structured training plans give a starting point and a finish line for your learners. They will be able to more accurately track their progress and see how close they are to achieving their goals. Yes, there is effort involved in curating a curriculum, particularly if you map training plans to job roles. However, there are two benefits: for the learner, the choice of what to do next is made easy, whilst the organisation gains confidence the learners are studying relevant content.
Use gamification
Apply gaming concepts to your learning. With Docebo, you can create badges and reward points for questions or courses. This can later result in distributing rewards to your employees.
Rewarding help your learners form a positive perception of learning and nurtures a more engaged approach towards your content.
Final thoughts
Creating a mature learning culture in your workplace is a continuous process. There are various steps that you can take to make your learning environment more engaging, social, and integrated into your culture. The impact of each step will depend on what works for your individual learners as they will each interact differently.
The Importance of QA in eLearning
What is QA?
In eLearning, Quality Assurance (QA) is the iterative process of reviewing content before sharing it with learners. At GuyKat, we conduct internal and external QA to ensure high quality and levels of innovation.
Here’s why an effective QA process is vital for your eLearning.
Internal QA
Once a version of content is complete, we send it to the internal review team. We take a multi-discipline approach towards our QA to benefit from broad expertise.
We focus on three major categories:
- Scripting - The text needs to communicate the subject matter clearly, in a way that suits the learner’s knowledge level. It needs to be grammatically correct and inspire the learner to progress through the material.
- User Interface (UI) - Graphics and design help to craft the narrative and engage learners. They must visually communicate the subject matter and represent the client’s branding. We need to make it easy for the learner to learn.
- User Experience (UX) - The functionality of interactive eLearning is one of the most important focuses. Testing ensures that the flow of the module is smooth and enables the learning journey. Interactions and engagements add flair and must run without any glitches.
External QA
After performing our internal reviews, it’s the client’s turn. Depending on the level of development chosen, clients can have 2-5 rounds of feedback for their content. This is a key step in our collaboration on a project. It’s your last chance to check that our work meets your expectations before launch.
If needed, we’re happy to implement minor changes (e.g., text or graphics) to enhance the learning experience. We understand that you might spot new tweaks when seeing your eLearning come to life for the first time. However, it's vital to avoid fundamental redesign. The higher your engagement in earlier stages of the project, such as storyboarding, the smoother this process will be.
GuyKat tips:
- Be confident in communicating your expectations and identifying any specific areas for improvement. Changes are much more effective when the issue and goal is made clear.
- Enlist someone from your target audience to review your content. Fresh eyes may spot things that those buried in the detail could miss.
The Importance of QA
Successful eLearning requires rigorous testing, particularly when it involves advanced functionality and interactions. It ensures that your eLearning performs consistently and intuitively.
Done well, QA is the difference between having an imperfect version of what you asked for and having a perfect version of what you need.
Related content: Building a Collaborative Partnership with Your eLearning Content Provider
eLearning Module or Instructor-Led Webinar?
When talking with our clients, we noticed that there is confusion about when to use an Instructor-led online course or an eLearning module. Clients ask what are the advantages and disadvantages of those delivery methods.
Let’s start with the basics:
What is an Instructor-led webinar?
An Instructor-led webinar is a live broadcast, hosted with technology such as Zoom or Microsoft teams to distribute information, messages, updates and news to a wide audience. This could also involve polls, live Q&A and chats during the webinar.
What is an eLearning module?
An online lesson that can be accessed anytime, anywhere and usually covers one to three learning elements such as video, quiz and gaming.
To help you decide which one to use, let’s look at the pros and cons of each:
Advantages of Instructor-led webinar:
- Possibly the quickest way to deliver information.
- Having a booked appointment means people are more likely to turn up.
- Allows interactivity between attendees via chat, polls and live Q&A.
- Allows interactivity with the tutor.
Disadvantages of Instructor-led webinar:
- Technology issues. The internet bandwidth or software glitches can result in non-attendance or poor user experience.
- Different people absorb information at different paces. In this case, learners must proceed at the pace of the instructor. Their effective learning pace might be slower.
- Even great instructors have bad days. It is difficult to deliver the same level of training consistently across different sessions.
- Instructor and learner availability can limit the course reaching the full target audience.
Advantages of the eLearning course:
- Every single person receives the same learning experience. The ‘instructor’ can never have a bad day.
- eLearning modules allow the learners to proceed at their own pace.
- The course will always be available. When you build an eLearning course, you create a long term reusable asset for your organisation.
- Done well, an eLearning module will look more credible and be more engaging.
- The scale of deployment. There are no incremental costs if you deliver to 5 or 50,000 people, based in any location, 24/7.
- Easy to translate and localise.
Disadvantages of the eLearning module:
- A bigger upfront investment.
- It takes time to put together good eLearning.
Final thoughts
Think about what you’re looking to deliver with your training. Is it a hot topic for your organisation? Do you think when you deliver a lesson the learners will immediately have questions? Is the content likely to change quickly? If so, a webinar might be best.
Is the content unlikely to change for a while? Is there value in it being available 24/7? Is the content just sharing knowledge rather than traditional training? Do you need to measure completion or compliance? If so, eLearning might be best.
The answer will be unique to your circumstances. Hopefully, the thoughts outlined above will help you reach it.
Why Outsourcing Your Docebo Administration Could Be the Smartest Thing You Do
Our dedicated support team provides managed system administration and enhanced support for Docebo clients. We act as an extension of your in-house team. We focus on the platform, allowing you to focus on the content.
We offer around the clock support for all of our clients, responding to queries within 4-8 business hours. Most topics can be dealt with over email, but we’re happy to jump on a Zoom call when necessary. We can also work with Docebo’s help desk to speed up any technical troubleshooting with the platform itself.
Here are six of our most frequently engaged support topics.
1. User Configuration
We often help with creating new users and organising users into groups or branches. We can upload new users in bulk or individually, as well as assisting with implementing or maintaining the desired user structure. It’s also common for us to resolve various sign-in issues.
2. Page and Menu Access
User permissions determine the content and areas of the platform that users can access. When users lack visibility of the right content or pages, we ensure that menu and page settings are configured to provide suitable access.
Related Content: Find out more about user levels and permissions.
3. Front-end Design
Clients reach out to us when they want to customise the look and feel of their platforms (with out-of-the-box Docebo features). We tailor the platform UI and layout to suit the client’s branding and realise their vision. For example, we often tweak landing pages or switch banners to suit upcoming events.
Related Content: Find out more about bespoke front-end design for your Docebo.
4. Reporting
Keeping track of user activity and progress is vital for monitoring the effectiveness of your platform. We help clients extract the right data about certain users or courses. We can set up custom reports that run in the background and can either be downloaded or received. For example, we can set up a monthly report on user activity for a course to show how users are engaging.
5. Courses
We help troubleshoot problems with the functionality or behaviour of a course on the platform.
Some common issues include:
-
- Courses showing the incorrect completion status.
- SCORM issues - such as failing to track user progress or being unable to play.
6. Extra Features
To stay ahead of the game, Docebo hosts a variety of extra features and has frequent platform updates. We help clients implement and adapt to new features, teaching them how to make the most out of their platforms. Through discussing their needs, it’s common for clients to identify areas of weakness and for us to introduce them to a feature that could benefit them.
Our Support Goals
When enlisting our support services, we work hard to implement changes, troubleshoot issues, and find solutions. You’re supported to achieve more efficient platform improvements and maintenance, as we can get the job done quicker and resolve issues that you’re unable to.
Our dedicated team provides reliable communication, with clients reporting to the same help desk and often speaking to the same person throughout their query. This gives us a stronger familiarity with your needs and leads to more consistent support.
We leverage our expertise to help you optimise your Docebo platform and reap the full benefits of your technology investment.
