On-demand training videos are the just best, right? You don’t have to juggle schedules, time zones, or last-minute conflicts with your target audience. There’s no risk of technical issues popping up during your session. And if you drop the recording into a learning management system (LMS), you now have visibility into who has watched and who still has to complete their training—no need to spend time looking through meeting logs to check attendance, since all of the tracking mechanisms are automated, logged, and stored within a learning platform.
Self-paced learning via videos is the easy and obvious path for most organizations. They serve as an equal-opportunity winner in learning: They’re consistent, seeing as how it’s the exact same content, repeated the exact same way each and every time a learner goes through a session. The value is evident: Not only do the messaging, pacing and presentations remain consistent, but we’re also able to remove any time zone barriers due to the always-on nature of the sessions—and even language ones, as well (assuming a global company has native speakers to translate content or an AI assistant to take on that role). As an added bonus, if you’re hosting the recording in an LMS, the platform can automatically log attendance, which helps cut down on administrative overhead and keep people accountable.
Not the Be-All, End-All
So, then, we’re settled, are we not? On-demand training is no longer “the future.” It’s here and ready now, and with the added benefit of removing the administrative overhead of scheduling sessions and tracking attendance, it’s pretty much a shoo-in as the most logical way forward when training needs arise. Learners are alerted when a session is ready for their eyes, and any laggards who haven’t attended within a specific timeframe are identified automatically, reducing the need for a manual attendance registry and eliminating any sort of attendance-report-building that those in charge of learning may have had to provide up the corporate ladder.
Leaning into on-demand videos is not a terrible thing by any means. However, if we pigeonhole our learners into that singular approach with no additional avenues, we’re also removing a crucial calculation from the fold: How do learners learn best? For all of the seemingly upfront perks on-demand videos seem to provide, not all learners learn well when sitting and consuming content without any human interaction or ability to ask and get their questions and curiosities answered.
Provide Additional Support
Trainers generally are working with a population of learners from Baby Boomers to Gen Z, and each group’s learning preferences, just like their communication and social media preferences, vary greatly. Does that mean that Boomers, Gex Xers, Millennials, and Gen Zers would rather block off an hour in the middle of their day for a “lunch and learn” just so they can have a human present the same information that otherwise would be in a self-paced video? For the most part, no. But if your organization decides that leveraging self-paced videos will be the sole way to learn, you need to provide additional support to ensure the content is not only understood but any questions and concerns are addressed, as well.
Sure, you can add a mechanism to an on-demand session that asks for questions or feedback, but, per SurveyMonkey, survey response metrics are considered “good” from 10 to 29 percent and “excellent” at anything 30 percent or higher. You’re very likely losing a significant number of people-focused scenarios or role-based questions that impacted people might have.
So how do we ensure that an audience that’s impacted by a new process—or even just a basic change to a long-standing policy—adopts the new way forward and follows the proper steps in a self-paced training session?
The answer is simple: Give impacted people a way to have questions asked and answered so they understand—fully—the impacts they care about: the “what’s in it for me?” Here are a few options:
- Host office hours in varied time slots for impacted teams to ask questions.
- Ask team leadership if an L&D team member can sit in during team meetings and offer to have a candid discussion about what the change means for the impacted group, or to further explain details, impacts, or key benefits.
- Host open-door sessions—no agenda—for people to drop in and out of as schedules permit, allowing freeform discussion or knowledge transfer as learners’ schedules allow.
However, don’t keep that knowledge confined in the vacuum of those meetings. Collect each of those questions and answers and publish an FAQ that’s centrally located and easy to find and reference. Send out multiple rounds of messaging to the impacted groups to keep them feeling “in the know” so they’re aware and engaged.
Self-paced training videos are here to stay, and the value is evident. Let’s make sure that the learners who are watching the content we develop aren’t forgotten along the way.
