What makes the meeting between the participant and the educator so rewarding? You have probably already realized that while the self-study training is beneficial for reviewing facts and for repetition, the strengths of the instructor-led training are the personal meetings and the social aspects.

A strong training offer includes both parts for self-study and parts together with an instructor. In the text Great opportunities with online learning, we highlighted five advantages of self-study and now it is time to focus on the instructor-led parts.

An educator contributes to a good learning situation by:

Explaining – Humans are made for learning things together with others and few things are as effective as asking questions and having the answer explained by someone knowledgeable on the subject.

Exemplifying – Bringing the topic to life by sharing your own examples, preferably self-experienced, will be memorable to the participant in a completely different way than reading the corresponding information.

Deepening – An instructor can easily move between explaining and deepening the subject corresponding to the target group’s prior knowledge and pre-understanding. This means that the content of the training is dynamically adapted to the needs and thus becomes accurate.

Discussing – During an instructor-led training, participants can be guided and encouraged by an instructor to share experiences that they would not otherwise have shared. By talking about a topic and discussing with others, participants reach a deeper level of knowledge.

Creating relationships – In the meeting between instructor and participant there is a social interaction that builds relationships, creates mutual trust and that can lead to returning customers.

Luckily, you don’t have to choose one format or the other, on the contrary – hybrid is here to stay! In Sparkfore, you can easily post course events, where the participant can book their seat in the webshop, which let you to manage both self-study and instructor-led training in an efficient way. Contact us for more information!

In an instructor-led training, you can easily see the reactions of the participants and change your presentation accordingly. This is not easily done with a self-paced online training, but a course of good quality has its starting point in the people who will participate in it, i.e. the target group. When you plan your course, take a moment to think about what you know about the target group and adapt the training accordingly. Here are three tips on how you can do the target group adaptation.

1. Previous knowledge

What does the target group already know? Is the prior knowledge even or uneven within your intended target group? A good online course covers both these situations. If the person who is going to take the course lacks the necessary prior knowledge, you can insert explanations and links to more information that will help the course participant. If the person who is taking the course already knows the basics about the subject, it is a good idea to offer in-depth information and challenges that allow the course participants to enhance their knowledge.

2. Practical aspects

How will the target group complete the training? Will they be freed from their regular duties for a few hours, or will the course be conducted in parallel with work? A clear structure with short sections creates flexibility that benefits everyone. Do they use a computer, tablet, or mobile phone? Make sure to click through the online training as if you were one of the target groups. Does everything work as it should or do you need to make improvements?

3. Attitude and motivation

What is the target group’s attitude to the subject of the course? How is the target group’s motivation to complete the training? With small, simple means, you can make the subject interesting. Make it concrete by giving examples and describing real situations. Another way to encourage the participants is to ask questions, to let the course participant ponder for a while and then present the answer. Ensure variety in the training, so that the course participant gets to experience diverse types of content, for example texts, images, films, and exercises.

In conclusion, target group adaptation is about changing perspective as well as reviewing the course from the course participant’s situation: What does the target group know about the subject, how do they complete the course and what is the target group’s attitude? With small, simple means, you can ensure that your online course becomes an attractive offer.

Good luck!

Security should always be your most important concern when you’re working with information and data. In a learning platform there are three keystones - digital training content, user data and user results - that need to be protected. It is important to feel secure that the data does not end up in the wrong hands, both for your own sake and for the sake of all your course participants.

Content is protected

The development practices of Moodle LMS, on which Sparkfore is based, include security by design. This means that the software itself is developed to help keep users, files and data safe. As the software rests on open-source code, the application is monitored by a global network of developers who quickly resolve bugs and security issues that may arise, reducing the impact of vulnerabilities and security breaches. The Sparkfore cloud service includes continuous maintenance, which gives you a secure and up-to-date system automatically.

Two-step access

To be able to take part of content in the learning platform, two “doors” need to be opened. Firstly, you’ll need a login to the learning platform and secondly, the all logged-in users need to be granted access to the course(s). The advantage of this two-step access model is that different people can access different content. As a Training Manager, you can easily overview the total number of users in the learning platform and extract a user list for each course.

Roles with different permissions

A general guideline for maintaining good security is to limit who is given permissions and to restrict permissions to a minimum. In the same way that not everyone who visits a bank can enter the vault, the learning platform uses different roles to determine permissions. New users have the role of course participants, which means they can edit their own user data and complete courses. Only you who manage the system can add, edit and delete users and courses.

All this – the protection of the content, the two-step access and the roles with different permissions – means you can be sure that Sparkfore is safe for you and your users.

What is the point of good and quality online training that no one participates in? The key to success is to reach out with the digital learning offer to course participants so that the trainings can be of use. It may sound obvious, but it’s easy to overlook. Here are some tips on how to reach out and grow your business with digital learning.

Digitize your course offering

Build an online course catalog through planning, producing and publishing courses in various subjects. Please read the blog post How to make amazing online courses to learn more. The courses can, for example, consist of recorded web meetings, filmed trainings, interactive exercises, instructor-led elements and digital self-correcting quizzes. Keep a consistand form with a course evaluation and a course certificate at the end. The Sparkfore template will help you with that.

Customize messages

Go through and, if necessary, adapt the text in the messages to will be sent to the course participants. Sparkfore offers four predefined messages that are used at different times:

• Welcome - a message with the course link is sent to new course participants to confirm their access to the course.
• Inactive - a notification to participants who have not been active in the course for three weeks.
• Complete - a message to participants who have passed the course with a link to the course certificate.
• F2F - a message linked to the course date to remind course participants one day in advance of a calendar event.

All messages can be sent by e-mail or by SMS. If you choose email, you can add an image, such as your company logo, to the header or footer. Note that the default setting is that the messages are disabled, so you need to toggle to Active for them to be sent.

Talk to your customers

An online course catalogue is of little use if no one knows it exists! Talk to your customers, friends and acquaintances to make them aware of your digital learning offer. Tell them about the benefits, e.g. that online training is flexible and accessible! You will find more benefits in the blog post Great opportunities with online learning.

Use your social media

Social media is perfect for creating awareness about your digital learning offer. Make posts that describe the different courses and preferably with quotes from customers who have taken the course and who agree to be references. Be patient to repeat your message and simplify your work by reusing materials that you have shared before. Digital marketing is about reaching your target audience step by step by raising awareness, creating interest, getting them to consider your offer and finally getting them to buy your courses.

Efficient and easy

As soon as a course participant has gained access to a course, the effient process begins: The automatic welcome message is sent as an SMS or e-mail, the course participant clicks on the link and enters directly the first section of the course. When all sections and the course evaluation have been completed, the learning platform registers that the participant has passed and issues a certificate with the current date, which is also confirmed with an automatic Completion message.

Do you want to be successful with your digital learning offer? Make sure to offer high quality by systematically and continuously following up results and evaluations that lead to improvements. Sparkfore helps you along the way through automatic settings and functions that are easy to use.

Goal fulfillment

Make sure you start from the beginning. To be able to follow up whether the course participants have passed the course or not, the content of the training itself needs to be based on learning goals that the participants must be able to do or know when they are finished.

Then decide whether it is enough for the participants to have gone through the content or whether they should prove their goal fulfillment through a test that is corrected automatically. We recommend you to offer a good mix of some modules with tests and others without, as well as a final test.

Sparkfore automatically sets settings for course completion. This means that when a course participant has completed all modules, the participant will pass the course. The learning platform registers the date and time when the course is completed and shows it on the course certificate.

Schedule reports

Sparkfore’s report tool makes it easy to follow up the course participants' progression. In the report builder you can overview several courses at the same time and in the report for course completion you can follow up specific courses by taking part in the course participants' status in three steps: not started, in progress or complete. You can also see in detail which sections are Unfinished or Done for each participant.

The reports can be downloaded in Excel format for further processing or shared via e-mail. When you share a report, you can choose whether the report mailings should be repeated daily, weekly or monthly, which contributes to a continuous follow-up.

Go through the reports by studying if there is any module or course where few has passed? And vice versa, if there are modules or courses where many or all participants have passed? Find out, for example, by talking to one of the course participants, if there is a problem that needs to be fixed and set aside time for it.

Course evaluations and forms

Add a standardized course evaluation to all your courses to systematically collect feedback from course participants. Sparkfore’s course template comes with an evaluation that is easy for the course participants to complete and which is a mandatory part of the course to get a certificate.

The course evaluation provides valuable insight into what needs to be improved. As an administrator, you can download the answers in csv format. Open in Excel and process the result (read more about importing csv file). Make it a habit to follow up evaluations regularly - semi-annually or quarterly based on usage. Are there any recurring requests? Are they easy or difficult to fix? Prioritize and plan time to implement improvements.

Good luck!