Five Best Practices When Converting Classroom Content for the Virtual Classroom

Taking traditional training materials online is akin tosubstituting baking soda for baking powder. It can be done, but it’s not astraight one-to-one translation. Adjustments must be made.

Content conversion must consider the learners. If theyaren’t in the classroom, are they sitting at desks, working the shop floor, orstreaming training on their phones in the park? It must consider the trainingformat. What happens when a daylong training session becomes multiple shorter blocksof eLearning? Content must be tailored to suit the configuration of the class.

Planning to takeconventional content into the digital arena? Here are five best practices toensure you can bring your most important content with you and deliver it inmeaningful ways when you leap the eLearning divide.

1. Take the format seriously

Conventional learningoffers one pedagogic format, the classroom. Students learn together in theconference room or auditorium, and they share similar resources: writingsurface, notebook, caffeine.

eLearning can take place anywhere.That means you must tailor content to suit the context, said Malcolm Poulin, seniordirector of product strategy for ANCILE Solutions.“It’s about the work environment. In an insurance company, 90percent of the people are sitting at their desks with a PC, but 10 percent ofthem are salespeople in the field, in their cars, with a phone or an iPad, andyou also have to match their capability. So, the technology you use has to beable to publish into formats that are consumable to match people’s work,” hesaid.

Forthat mobile salesperson, the content you build either has to consume minimalbandwidth or else be accessible offline. “So, they may need something indocumentation format, a printable PDF, or an online PDF that can be consumed ina small view,” he said. Interactive HTML may work well for the deskboundlearner, but keep in mind that others may not be able to tap the fullexperience.

2. Break it down

Often in the move to online learning, content goes frombeing a daylong seminar to being a series of digital installments. You’ll needto think about how to break it down.

“All of a sudden I don’tget you for eight hours of concentrated time. Maybe I get you for two hoursonline at most, so there are more sessions with more time in between them,”said Chris King, principle consultant at CRK Learning.

To deliver meaningful materials in this new environment, ithelps to start high and drill down. “First you ask: What is the learning goalfor the session? Now, what content do you have that will support that learninggoal, and can you do that in two hours or less? If you can’t, then you startmaking serious choices,” he said. Ask yourself: “What is truly important for meto check people’s knowledge on, versus where can I give them handouts or someother way to do asynchronous learning?”

His litmus test is a simple one-to-seven scale in responseto this query: “What is the impact on the learning if somebody fails to do thisright?”—ranging from no biggie to utter disaster. “You rate allyour content on that scale. Anything that rates a five or above, that is stuffyou absolutely have to put in the online session. The rest can be safely leftto asynchronous learning,” he said.

3. Get personal

Online content can suffer from a lack of personalization. Aninstructor at a remote location becomes a disembodied voice, a ghost cursor movesacross a presentation by an unseen hand. To convert from a traditionalclassroom to an e-experience, the instructor must find a way to make a humanconnection.

“Video does this well. It conveys a sense of personality, asense of the presence of the instructor. With a video component, you get notjust audio but visual cues,” said Diana Howles, owner and president of multimedia learningconsultancy Howles Associates.

Sherecommends instructors produce at least one pre-recorded video component forevery week of a multi-part course—for example, a new-hire orientation thatmight stretch for several weeks or months and may include both face-to-face andonline components. “This is how you get the personal side. It’s how youestablish that instructor’s presence” in the online segments, she said.

4. Keep it simple

Materials that seem orderly and manageable in a binder can morphinto a sprawling mess when published haphazardly online. A golden rule ofcontent conversion: Simplify.

Look at it this way. The online experience tends to beself-navigated. While there are certain instructor-curated touch points, muchcourse material must be discovered and ingested by students through their ownefforts. It’s up to the instructor, therefore, to offer ease of access.

“If you go to a learning management system and you open ascreen, and everything is in front of your face, most people close thatscreen,” Poulin said. The key to success is to build vertically, down into thepresentation, rather than horizontally, across the surface.

“You layer it so people are only presented with what theywant, and then if they want more they can go to the next layer,” Poulin said. “Yousee what you need in a streamlined fashion, and if you need more, you clickdown. It is based on what the user needs, not based on what the designer thinksthey are going to need.”

5. Fit the platform

“Online” or “eLearning” are broad terms that can befulfilled with an incredibly diverse range of technologies, with materialsdelivered in any number of possible formats, from PowerPoint to Word, frominteractive HTML to streaming video to static PDF. Determining the right formatcomes with a correlative task: finding the right platform.

“You have to look at the framework of the technology architecture,”King said.

Adobe Connect and GoTo Learning and WebEx all present “differentopportunities and different tools,” he said. Adobe Connect manages shared videomore easily than does WebEx, for example, “but with WebEx it is much easier todo your presentation by sharing a screen out of PowerPoint, where Adobe Connectdoes not do that as easily.”

The point here is not to recommend any one platform overanother, but merely to note that in making decisions about format, one may alsoneed to scrutinize platform choices. The two can push against each other, orthey can be complementary if adequate care is used in the selection process.

All these various considerations can help shape theconversion of traditional content into digital format, and from the physicalclassroom to the virtual. Underlying all these, though, is a single point ofemphasis that some experts say should be the driving force behind all theseother choices.

“Any time you take atraditional classroom curriculum and convert it into online format, we alwaysstart by looking at objectives,” Howles said. “What do you hope to accomplish?What is the learning objective? That is what ultimately drives the design.”