Engagement in learning is critical. Often it is the difference between impactful and irrelevant training. The challenge is that learning styles are variant and highly subjective. Therefore, it becomes critical for designers and facilitators to create opportunities where the learners can exercise their preferential style despite the modeling restrictions of ISD or ADDIE. However, there are some common denominators in learning style despite the diversity of preference. One in particular is conversation.
Conversation has been a lasting tool to engage and stimulate learning. The challenge in the classroom is conversation can be very restricted and one dimensional. What happens when a subgroup in the classroom wants to explore a topic more in depth while the instructor proceeds to move forward? What happens when the intellectual repository of the room is insufficient to provide an answer? How does one breach the four walls of the classroom to find a SME? How does a presenter/facilitator get immediate feedback in real time while leading the learning? The answer to these questions is the backchannel.
The backchannel can be dated back to your childhood when your classmate passed you a note asking you any number of questions. Because you were a great student, we’ll say the question was about the teacher’s discussion. Today, we have technology that allows us to tap the backchannel in more creative and open ways. One of the technologies that has emerged as a great source of backchannel learning is Twitter (www.twitter.com ).
Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that fits into classroom and e-learning quite effectively. Twitter allows the learners and facilitator to engage through several methods:
- Providing Real-Time Feedback. As 140-character comments (known as Tweets) are tweeted (another word for posted) a prepared facilitator can get a sense of how the learners are meeting objectives. This feedback can exist pre- and post-training as well as during the event.
- Providing “Just-in-Time” Information. Often a strong backchannel is monitored and when tweets are posted, the community can feed the backchannel with relevant information that may provide deeper understanding of the topic.
- Providing Conversation Direction. As a tweet is posted, it provides a conversational direction for anyone who may be monitoring that particular topic. The facilitator, learners, or other community members can ask questions to give the virtual conversation a direction.
All three of these methods make for a compelling case to use Twitter in the corporate classroom. Chances are you’ve probably heard the case for social media and tools like Twitter, but the bigger challenge is understanding how you can incorporate it into your training agenda.
Twitter is an engagement tool for not only the training delivery process but one that can be used throughout the entire ADDIE or ISD model. Following are suggestions to implement a Twitter strategy into your next corporate training event.
1. Analyze:
- Create a hashtag (tag used to address common tweets to be compiled together) for your needs assessment or analysis stage of development.
- Inform SMEs of the research you are doing and request they tweet information or suggestions. Twitter can be used as a no-cost data collection tool.
2. Design:
- Use Twitter to receive feedback on your learning objectives.
- Post progress on Twitter to keep stakeholders informed
- Use Twitter to gather SMEs for chat during design.
- Post tweets to start building excitement about the training event.
3. Develop:
- Program times in the lesson plan when you will review the tweet stream (the log of tweets collected under your hashtag).
- Create a series of questions the instructor will tweet during the training event. Tweets can be pre-scheduled using tools like tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com).
- Alert participants and community members not attending in advance of chat taking place pre-training, during training, and post-training
- Create activities where participants will use Twitter. You can use it to take polls using SAP Web2.0 PowerPoint Twitter Tool (http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/).
4. Implementation:
- Display the Twitter feed using the SAP tool or Tweetchat (www.tweetchat.com)
- Incentivize the use of Twitter during your training event.
- Address all tweets broadcast during your training event. This also includes tweets from those contributing to the tweet
stream who aren’t attending the event live.
5. Evaluation:
- Use twitter to collect Level 1 (Learner Satisfaction), Level 2 (Learning), and Level 3 (Behavior Change) evaluation data.
- Facilitate the chat beyond the training events completion.
- Record and post the tweet stream using tools like Tweetgrid (www.tweetgrid.com/irc).
As you can see, there are multiple places that Twitter can be incorporated into the ADDIE or ISD model. The backchannel is a powerful and effective tool when used appropriately. There are many tools that you can use to make the backchannel more secure (www.yammer.com) but realize there are limits to closed networks. Managing the backchannel is not a passive task. It is a critical task that is becoming more and more a part of the core competencies of trainers as technology continues to make its way into the corporate classroom.
