Narrowing the Distance

One of the most used technologies to increase my effiency is desktop sharing.  In case you are not familiar with the term, desktop sharing simply allows you to share your desktop with one or more people.  I use it often for training people far away or in different locations, collaborating with colleagues or to troubleshoot technology problems.

If you are interested in giving desktop sharing a try, there are no shortage of available applications.  Among them include:

• GoToMeeting
• Windows Live Meeting
• Vyew
• ShowMYPC
• WebEx
• TeamViewer

There are plenty more options out there, but this is a start.  A few things to note:

• Not all options are free.  GoToMeeting, Windows Live Meeting, and WebEX may offer free trials, but do cost money to keep.  Others, like TeamViewer may offer a free version for non-commercial use.
• Know what you are looking for.  Some options only allow one user to view your computer.  That may work for simple collaboration or technical support, but will hardly work for trainings.

What do I recommend?  Although free is great, I like GoToMeeting.  The cost is low enough and it offers several features that are great for training small groups.  If you need to train a larger group, you can upgrade or purchase GoToWebinar, which allows you to have hundreds of participants and provides advanced features like polling, access levels and more.

I’ve tried many of the other options out there, and while they usually work fine, I find most slow to load and react.  This may work for collaborating with a colleague, but if you are working with a client I recommend spending the $400 or $500 extra a year and use GoToMeeting.  Their newest version has integrated voice capabilities, which is a huge advantage over using a land or mobile line to call a long distance number to communicate (I always just used skype).  Finally, GoToMeeting does allow those you are connecting with to show their screen.  You can take control of their mouse and keyboard or vice versa as well.  Others may offer this same feature, but it’s worth mentioning either way.

I was at a conference put on by the Bob Pike Group not long ago and sat through an interesting session on evaluating your trainings.  They came up with four components you need to measure for effective professional development.  They were:

1. Like It
2. Learn It
3. Use It
4. Make a Difference

Although they didn’t offer many suggestions on how to actually do this, I liked their easy to understand components and data they had showing what organizations typically do.  Turns out that over 80% check to see if participants liked the training, less than 25% check to see if the content was learned, less than 10% check to see if you use it and get this… Less than 3% of organizations surveyed check to see if the training made a difference!

How can we apply this within eLearning?  It’s quite simple really, take a look at the following examples.  Feel free to add to them in the comments section if you would like:

Like It – Did your participants like the training?

• Imbed a survey at the end of your eLearning course.
• Use an external survey application, such as SurveyMonkey, to survey how your participants felt about the training
• Send an email to all participants asking for feedback. If you are tracking who is taking your course, you should already have their email. If not, simply ask for feedback. Sure not all participants will do so, but some will.

Learn It – Did your participants learn anything?

• I usually do this two ways. First, I imbed quizzes or “knowledge checks” throughout my learning environments.
• I also follow up a few weeks later, usually with the exact same questions to make sure knowledge was retained. I typically find that asynchronous online learning results are just as good, if not better, than face to face results.

Use It – Did your participants use it?

• Once again, use an application such as survey monkey or a simple email to ask participants if they are using what they learned
• For clients who need to ensure training goals are being implemented I go a step further. I typically send a web cam to the participant and have them use it in conjunction with Skype, a free instant message and voice of IP application. Once set up, I simply observe the participant in a setting and collect data on their use of the content covered in the training. This is a bit more work than simply sending an email, but much simpler and quicker than driving or flying to observe someone face to face. I can usually collect all the data I need in under 30 minutes instead of taking days to find common dates, travel arrangement, etc…

Make a Difference – Did the training make a difference?

• The answer to this can mostly be found in another post I did a few months ago on Deciding Which Trainings to Move Online. Trainings should be designed with the end in mind. If the goal is to increase sales, I should be able to see if it in fact increased sales as much as I had hoped. No secrets or technology tips here, but yet we still find that only 3% of organizations in the survey check this part out. I suppose they are just creating trainings just to be creating them?

Hope this helps some of you when you are looking at evaluating your training programs. The idea is to find ways to take advantage of available technology for your online or face-to-face trainings and imbed this into your training. Otherwise how will you ever know if your training did what it was designed to do?