Independent trainers: 3 questions to ask yourself before digitizing your offer

The current period requires most independent trainers, coaches or consultants to find new ways to transmit their expertise.

‍The question of digitizing their offer necessarily comes up again, with as many promises as questions.

What, when, how to digitize your offer when you have fine expertise and when most of your job is played in person?

1/ What would I like to digitize and for what purpose? 

First of all, it is important to get to the bottom of the reason for this digitalization project. Several objectives are possible, and can be accumulated over the same period or spread over time. Here are a few examples:

• complement my interventions with “digital” activities to do before, during or after face-to-face sessions
• provide my network with a generic digital module that is a call product for my face-to-face interventions
• create a 100% digital training course to be able to reach new targets who could not be trained in person
• be in a position to produce custom digital modules if my customer requests it

Once you are clear about your priorities, you can gather all the processes, resources, or materials that you are already using. It is possible that a large part of your contributions are not formalized. If this is the case, don't worry and just try to list the themes or issues that you deal with most often in person.

2/ Among the activities that I offer in person, what needs to be experienced collectively and what could be done individually?

‍This requires group dynamics, such as moments of sharing experiences, Role-playing games, group debriefings are the most valuable face-to-face moments. If you want to make these experiences live digitally, it will have to be digital. synchronous, that is to say that your learners are together at the same time and that they can all see each other/hear each other. The most classic format is webinar , which can be done with most video conferencing tools. If you want to get even closer to the face-to-face experience (for example writing on the board, doing activities in subgroups, correcting directly,...), more and more tools allow you to do virtual classrooms.

In theory, All the rest could be done by each of the learners separately, and not necessarily at the same time. In this case, your work as an independent trainer will consist in designing modules in advance that will be consumed by your learners, each at their own pace, and which will allow them to acquire the points generally addressed collectively. That's what we call digital modules asynchronous. These modules can be more or less interactive, depending on your educational choices and the tools you use. As soon as you want to create a minimum of interactivity, you will need to equip yourself with an authoring tool dedicated to training. These authoring tools are either general (they allow you to create different types of supports or activities), or focused on a particular type of activity. This is the case of the Didask authoring tool, which allows you to create digital modules focused on practical cases.

3/ What are the moments when my learners listen, receive, and when do I put them into action? 

Everything that is going to be in the order ofProviding information can be transmitted via classical digital media like videos or slides. Surely you already have them. If you need to create one, you will need to use presentation software (e.g. Powerpoint, Prezi, Keynote) and/or invest in video production. The LMS is preferred if you need to manage access to your content and/or monitor the progress of your learners. If you want to use this content as materials during a webinar or virtual classroom, be sure not to overload your slides so that the focus stays on you. And if you want these resources to be consulted asynchronously by your learners, it is important to associate them with more engaging activities.

For Put your learners into action At a distance, ask yourself each time if you could get your messages across through a question, an exercise, a scenario. This reflex is even more important when creating asynchronous modules. Because without a trainer, without group emulation, and with 100% passive content, it is very likely that your learners will drop out completely... To avoid this, you need to focus on creating interactive modules. The most accessible format is the Quiz , which many tools make it easy to do. You can also go explore others like The digital case study, the interactive video, the Serious Game , the vr ,... which will have in common that they will make your distance learning sequences more immersive.

At Didask, we have opted for a simple and effective format: the digital case study. The Didask solution includes a method that helps you think and compose practical cases based on your content, then transforms them into interactive modules for your learners.

In this period of uncertainty, we wanted to facilitate access to our solution and our support. If you want to test Didask for two months, do not hesitate to contact our team.

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