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Technology can be intimidating. Some “old-school” trainers may even hold a negative bias against using newer technologies or judge their effectiveness more harshly when compared to more familiar methods.

Darlene Christopher recounts her experience of seeing the increased demand for nontraditional training approaches to be successful, especially ones with more technological approaches to learning. There is a lot of pressure on alternative education strategies to be successful, even when compared to the same shortcomings that are experienced by seemingly “tried-and-true” methods.

Transcript

Darlene Christopher:          I think there is some resistance to technology. It’s a matter of selecting the right delivery tool that you’re going to use to match what the need is that you’re trying to solve. It depends on who’s making the decisions.

When people say that it can’t work, it’s because they’ve not seen it done well. There’s a harsher lens to it than there is with traditional training. There can be very poorly done face-to-face classroom training, and somehow that’s okay. Somehow organizations can get away with that. When it’s done through a virtual classroom, for example, and it doesn’t work well, all of a sudden that’s it; or if there’s a self-paced e-learning that wasn’t properly designed, now turned off to it forever.

So that’s why it’s so important if you are going to do a virtual classroom delivery. It needs to be really well-designed, really well-facilitated, rehearsed, and done well, because there’s a lot more criticism toward the technology-based training.