Making virtual a reality

How do you ‘bring people together’ for a great learning experience, if your business is spread across different locations, without wasting a lot of time and cost of travel?

We’ve been working with Norwegian-based global media company Schibsted Media Group to deliver virtual instructor-led learning sessions for their divisional leaders in 40 countries. We think it’s a good example of how learning is changing - a truly engaging virtual learning experience that defies the norm.


A far cry from standard ‘virtual PowerPoint presentation’ webinars, we’ve created four-hour virtual learning experiences, which feature many of the accelerated learning principles that are normally reserved for a classroom. Yes, that’s right: we keep virtual attention span for four hours!

It’s definitely a challenge to create a virtual learning program that can keep people engaged for that length of time, and to do that we have leveraged face-to-face facilitation styles, though facilitated virtually, to help drive a higher sense of engagement across the distributed audience. Participants engage in virtual break-out sessions for small group discussions, and they benefit from experiences such as one-to-one skills practice with an actor-facilitator. But they do it all at their laptop or tablet, without any need to travel.

The key to an effective virtual program lies in the design.  All too often the discussion on virtual learning is concentrated at the ‘delivery’ stage of the program – in other words what can we do to save money on time and travel.  This often results in learning designs that were intended for face-to-face interaction being distilled to a more passively delivered learning platform – at the risk of compromising the learner experience. With virtual in mind from the start, however, it is possible to think creatively about the selected technology and how it will add to the learning outcome and save money on the program.

The core focus of keeping participant needs as a priority drives us to challenge assumptions about learning and to think more holistically about how things can work better.

While the pace of technology is changing, it’s important to remember that it’s ultimately about putting the technology to work for us, not the other way around. We’re really proud that we’ve defied convention and created such an effective virtual learning experience. To read more about our experience in re-defining virtual learning at Schibsted, check out our story in Training Journal.

Learning is changing… and so are we!

Todd