Throwing techniques at a performance problem doesn’t work. You have to work out what’s going wrong and why. And then you need to create or customize approaches to address it.
But when you’ve not had much experience with online learning, you don’t have a big toolbox to pull from.
I’m sure you’ve got it in you to come up with great ideas from scratch – but it’s a lot easier to tweak, combine and adjust existing ones.
There are three things that most people think of when it comes to online learning: webinars, point and click e-learning, and longer courses with assignments. But these aren’t easy to do. At least, not well.
It’s a paradox that when you don’t have much experience with it, you try to do what’s hard, rather than use one of the easy online learning options.
If you’ve got limited time to prepare and limited experience with online learning, here are some ideas that you can try. Of course, for learners to actually acquire a skill, they need to practice it. Not all of these ideas create ways for them to do that. But they can be important supports, references and prompts for them as they practice.
1.Record a screen capture video of you reviewing a proposal.
Explain what you’re looking for, what’s your thought process, how do you spot a good/bad one, where are you looking, what do you skip, etc….. That assumes that proposals are a problem! But they often are, and it’s a way to show your thought process or overall thinking about projects.
Of course, you could do it about some other document or piece of work that is more relevant to your specialism – like a technical specification or construction design, or a budget. Something where you can show your thought process – and share it with people who will benefit from it – in a way that works for them. Watching a video they’re in control of when they get the information. And they can watch it again if it’s not clear.
2.Instead of a presentation webinar, run a Q&A / Ask Me Anything session.
They ask any questions they’ve got and you give them answers. This saves you time on writing a presentation that may or may not be exactly what they need. It gets them answers to questions that they really want to know about (not your ideas of what’s good for them!). And it gives you a chance to understand what they’re really interested in.
3.Use the questions that you get in that to write an FAQ sheet.
Add a few more questions that didn’t get asked but that you get asked a lot, or you think are important. Put it online. And send the link to your learner group! Putting it online means you can keep it updated and you can keep referring learners back to it – especially as new people join your organisation.
4.Instead of having a presentation, interview one of your team
Ask them about what goes wrong in their work (or some other aspect of humanitarian response). Record it and upload it to YouTube (or another site) – and share the link! You can ask them the questions that you imagine someone new to the field might have. Even better, you can collect the questions in advance. But also, you can just go where the conversation takes you and explore some topics with nuance that you might not manage in a presentation
5.Make a video of you (or a colleague) talking about how you approach your work
Go from the beginning to the end of a project or deployment. Go into lots of detail so that people can really see what steps you take. You actually know already what you do, so it doesn’t take that much preparation. You’re good at your job – certainly good enough that it wouldn’t hurt for more people to approach things the way that you do! When you do this, you give them a “recipe” for a good enough project or deployment. Be specific about your actions though. If you keep it too high-level (“coordinate”, “manage”, etc.) it won’t be as helpful as if you explain exactly what steps you take to coordinate or manage the work.
6.Run a Q&A session over Skype/WhatsApp for one week.
Make a group in whatever chat app works best for you. Everyone has to ask a question in that week to “pass”. Provide the answers as they ask the questions, in the chat. As with the Ask Me Anything call – note down the questions (and answers) and put them into an FAQ which you share.
Other software might be better for organising the discussion, but something that you and others are already using is the easiest to set up and run.
7.Send the learners some sample project information – and have them make a design
Send them some information (over email) and ask them to create a simple design (maybe a logframe) and send it back to you. And give them some feedback on their work over email. It might take you a while to do that – but that is time well spent giving people feedback on their work. And it doesn’t need you to do anything that you can’t do already. It just (!) needs your time – but you won’t have to learn anything new or puzzling.
