Scatterwork gets a lot of comments about why Training in Cyberspace can’t work so it makes sense to listen to what is being said. A lot of them boil down to personal issues and here are five of them.
One is that the participant has the freedom to be engaged or not to be engaged; to come on time or not to come on time and thats related to self-control.
If during a program, they get involved in other things because nobody can see them, then clearly the training interaction or the learning interaction is not going to be as effective.
The third one is that it can be very impersonal to be on the receiving end of training through cyberspace. That can be very appropriate for example for a webinar where there’s a thousand people online but if you’ve got a team and they need to learn things, it is not as good that they are just on the receiving end, a bit like a cinema.
A fourth objection is the one of responsibility. Again it is a bit like the freedom. People have the responsibility to learn – that is always true of course – but it in a live training environment somebody will notice that it is not working very well and they might cajole or pull people in. But in the cyberspace environment nobody is going to notice.
Another objection we get is that it can be very isolating. You are doing your learning, you don’t really know who else is involved, and this makes it harder to follow up. So in Scatterwork we have a few guidelines that help us when we are preparing learning in cyberspace. We make sure the participants get to know each other personally.
This can be by for example showing each other their Facebook pages or something more than “hello let’s start the business”.
We hold training for teams, not for individuals because by being part of a team it makes learning much better, particularly topics that are in any case targeted at teams – such as project management.
We build in processes to keep the participants in touch after the training event. It is not adequate just to say “you guys can be in touch with each other” – you really need to provide some sort of structure for it to happen.
And likewise for programming the time, somebody who’s doing a program also has to do some private learning. It does not work too well just say “you should do some programming of when you’re going to learn”. It’s much better to build that in as part of the progra.
So if you want to discuss any of these issues with me, then please feel free to connect – I look forward to hearing from you.
Dr. Deasún Ó Conchúir (pronounce) is a Collaboration Consultant at Scatterwork, which supports Project Solutions for Virtual Teams.
Email: deasun@gd.scatterwork.com
Tel: +41 79 692 4735 Talk to me
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