What is Synchronous e-learning?
Synchronous learning is the type of learning you participate in when sitting in class or a training seminar. Synchronous learning is learning in real-time with a teacher, tutor, or facilitator at the helm of the room, leading the discussion, encouraging active participation in the learning material. When taking this format online, synchronous learning becomes synchronous e-learning. Synchronous e-learning refers to real-time online learning best exemplified by online classes, training sessions, and webinars taught through an online platform.
Benefits of Synchronous e-Learning
Synchronous e-learning such as virtual classes or virtual instructor-led training (VILT) takes the traditional teacher or facilitator in-room model online. This helps you teach at scale at less cost without sacrificing the productive student-teacher interaction that most have come to expect from their learning experiences.
1. Reduced Cost, Still Human
People tend to think everything online or through software is robotic and impersonal. Virtual instructor-led training enables your instructors to retain that personal touch that drives learner success without the costs of in-person training: Travel, hotels, meeting spaces, etc.
By adopting a virtual classroom tool for your employee training programs, you can save money without losing the dynamic qualities of synchronous learning. The instructors can present their course content and have a dialogue with their learners in real-time. If someone has a question, then it can be answered in a timely fashion.
You can even offer more real-time training activities without the additional costs of travel. This means you can train more people, more frequently, and still save money!
2. Teach and Train At Scale
Teaching at scale is another great way to save time and money. Webinars are a perfect way to reach a broad audience while still delivering an impactful synchronous e-learning experience.
You can present your course content, such as videos, presentations, and quizzes in real-time. Instead of offering many smaller sessions, you can complete your company-wide compliance requirements, school orientations, and lectures in one real-time session with hundreds or thousands of learners.
During the webinar, learners can engage you and the content by asking questions and getting answers that help them succeed in their learning journey.
3. Collaboration, Engagement, And Interactivity
The best part of learning with a teacher and your peers in real-time is learning and working together. Learning together gives learners the ability to engage with the content, the teacher, and each other in ways that asynchronous e-learning cannot match.
Now I know the learning pyramid is a source of debate these days. However, if we look at the highest retention categories, ie. Discussion, Practice, Teach Others – then, we can piece together the value of collaboration and engagement through group learning and work.
Virtual classrooms not only replicate the real classroom experience, but they can improve upon it by offering a suite of collaborative tools that encourage active learning. Tools like Breakout Rooms encourage practice and discussion, digital whiteboards for interactivity, and screen sharing for teaching others, all work together to bring to life the classroom experience.
4. Improved Learner Outcomes
At the end of the day, we judge a successful class based on our learners’ success. Everything that we do is to improve learner outcomes.
The best way to improve learner outcomes is to have a professional facilitator available to teach and answer questions along the way. The instructor can offer real-time insights to students to help them understand while gaining the ability to receive instant feedback on the quality of their instruction to improve upon themselves. Synchronous e-learning provides a space for instructors to interact with students to improve the class’s success rate.
Instructors can also rely on data from their virtual classroom platform to get real-time and on-demand analytics such as Attendance records, participation in text chat, recordings, browser focus reports, attentiveness metrics, and more. All of this data helps the instructor offer a more improved and personal teaching approach to improve learner outcomes.
Tools are available now, it is your time to shine and create memorable educational moments online.
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