Leveling Up Your Engagement in Your VILT Training with Dan Braithwaite

Luis Malbas  
All right, welcome back, everybody. Thanks again for joining us here at the Immersive Learning Conference produced by the training, learning and development community. It's good to have all of you. Looks like people are coming into the room. Now this is the last session of the event. We've had five so far, and so we're going to be completing everything with this sixth session. It's been great all around I have learned a ton. I wasn't sure what to expect exactly with immersive learning in 2025 but it feels like we've gone over a lot of stuff that is pretty much expected. We've had VR we've talked about AI a lot. We had a storyline session, and yeah, and there's been other things too, like yesterday, we talked about reflection and integrating that into into your immersive learning experiences and how that can be important. So yeah, we have run a spectrum of things through this event. And so I hope if you haven't seen all of the sessions, you can go back and watch the recordings here on Crowdcast, and then I'll have them up here for a little while, and then I'm going to take them down and put them on the tldc website, where, if you remember, you can access them there. All right, I'm gonna take a look at the chat area. I can see that Kim is making comments. Laura's back. Sarah Brown Russo, thank you for being here. And anybody else that wants to say hi or post where they're logging in from, please do so in chat so we can, we can acknowledge that you're here. Thank you. Abby, good to see you. All right, so let's go ahead and get started. Our final presenter for the event is Dan Braithwaite. Dan is the direct the senior director of training at media ocean, a leading platform for omni channel advertising with over a decade of product training experience. Dan leads a global team delivering engaging, blended learning experiences to users around the world that's gonna be talking about loving it, leveling up your engagement in your vi LT training. Let's see, Dan, I'll let you explain what vi lt is to everybody so that they know. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and hide myself from the screen and let you take over.

Dan Braithwaite  
Awesome. Thank you very much for the introduction and Hello and welcome everyone. You'll gather from the accent that I'm not from the US. I'm about an hour south of London in the UK. So it is is almost my bedtime, but I could not go to bed before, obviously presenting at this event. And hopefully you can see the slide in front of you. And in fact, it looks like one person has already gone ahead and given this a go, I'd love to get a gage of what vehicles experience is, of V i l t. So V i l t is virtual instructor led training, and so that's what we're going to be talking tonight, delivering training on products, on software online, to a virtual audience. So I've got a QR code here. So this is different, maybe something that you don't often get encouraged to do when you're attending a quote, unquote training. But if you do want to grab your phone, you can scan the QR code using your camera app. You don't need to log into a Google account. There will be an option that says anonymous, and it's still some once your name. Don't worry, I'm genuinely not collecting your data for any reason. But I just wanted to see get an idea from this audience what kind of experience you have of v, I, L, T and virtual instructor led training. So it looks like it's all coming live on the screen right now, which is pretty cool. And also, if you want to come and say hi in the chat as well, let us know where you're from, that would be pretty cool as well. And the weather in the UK, if anyone is interested, is mild, just mild. Doesn't really ever get much better than that, to be honest with you. Cool. So what have we got going on so far? We've got five responses, somebody who's very experienced. We've got a few that are fairly experienced and little experience so far. So we've got a definite mixture, nobody with no experience at the moment. Okay, so I can't completely make up the next 45 minutes of time here, or 50 minutes of time completely make it up on the spot. Everyone will find me out pretty quickly if I try to do that. So there is some experience that's on here, perfect. Well, I'm going to start moving on to the next slide, but feel free, the QR code is going to be coming up a couple of times during this session. So let's see how we get on with that. And so before we really kind of get into the meat of it, let's just get an early win, a top tip straight away, which is to engage the audience as quickly as you can, and don't use the phrase while we wait, and that is an engagement disaster, using the while we wait. And of course, you're all probably very familiar with the fact there may be many reasons why you're running late to something, and many good reasons why that may be. Case. But for those of you that attend a training session, you turn up on time, you don't want to have that feeling that you're being almost penalized for arriving on time whilst we have to wait for others to turn up. So it kind of sets that nice expectation that your your classes, your live trainings, always can start when they're supposed to start. Doesn't even really feel like it's started because you start with an activity, you kind of get going, and you softly enter into the class without necessarily fully announcing that the class is beginning. So you're not really allowing any participants to disconnect. And we know in the world that we live in now, disconnection can happen pretty quickly. This chap seems pretty engaged with his mobile phone right now, but he might be getting pinged on Slack. He might get pinged on Outlook. He might be watching Disney plus, and he also might be watching Netflix. That is also a possibility as well, but that's that's hope, if he was being distracted, it was for better reasons, maybe than that. And then another early win in terms of top tips is to leverage the experience. So obviously, we've just seen from the earlier poll that we've we've got a crowd of folks that we've got some fair experience, somewhat experienced, and a couple that are very experienced. So when you're delivering training to a group of learners, there's always going to be that possibility that there's going to be varied experience levels, and so how do you engage those that are maybe more experienced than others? And it's really about trying to reinforce the idea that you may be kind of the instructor here and you're delivering the content, but ultimately, there's an opportunity for everybody to learn from everybody. And that's all kind of graphic. Maybe that kind of highlights the various different ideas around this, you know, building trust. If you've got users of the product that have experience within it, and they can help answer some of those questions, it kind of because it makes it a little bit more real. Or certainly, if they've had experience in the platform, they could speak to real examples and scenarios that they've been through, and it was kind of bills, kind of peer learning as well, encouraging others to feel more comfortable with talking to each other. I had a session very recently where the company I worked for, media ocean, we were delivering a training session to an organization, and one of the participants had 20 years of experience in the industry. So that's a lot more experience than I've got in that industry. And considering that's day to day experience in the industry, they were going to have so much wealth that they could explore with the team. So anytime there was a conversation about maybe terminology or best practices or ways of doing things, it was great to leverage that person on there and build that kind of key and learning, which also ultimately kind of turns into more of a community thing afterwards as well community in the class, but also afterwards, can they build relationships that potentially they can take with them afterwards and use each other as resources. And, you know, maybe selfishly from the instructor perspective. It helps kind of break up the format as well. Gives you a little bit of a rest at points. You can grab your water if needs be. It just makes the session a bit more dynamic, a bit more, you know, interesting. It's not this robotic situation of just going through line by line. So yeah. So welcome to the talk. Couple of tips already, but the talk is going to be leveling up engagement in your V, I, L, T, customer training. So that's virtual instructor led training, and I've already had an intro, so I won't dwell too much on this for too long, but have led a global team for some time of huge increases in MPs over the years and deflection of support to get some product MPs results as well. So what we've been doing over the years at media ocean has had impact, and we've been progressively improving it over the years. So another top tip is, you're going to get fired. These top tips, tips flying out of the dartboard here from the image. But another tip is, if there is the opportunity to show the learning objective rather than a list on the slide, is a great opportunity to do so, because with that, learners can kind of start to connect what's happening to the real tasks that they're going to be performing. So here's where I'm going to very cheekily put up what the learning objective is for this talk, which is, I'm hoping by the end of this talk, everyone that's here is going to take away one thing from this talk. Now I would selfishly and egotistically likely want to take away a little bit more than one, but if you just take one thing away from today, given that there's obviously some pretty decent experience on this talk, then that'll be an absolute win. So that is what we are going to be aiming for with this talk. And there is obviously going to be a QR code of this later on to go for it. So in terms of the agenda, we're breaking it into two core topics, and. Take you through an engagement framework that we use at Meteor ocean for delivering the IoT sessions. And then I'm going to talk to you about the structuring that we have designing for VRT, so structure that we've implemented with that and a few other bits and pieces alongside with that. Now I call this slide hot take. It probably is a very mild take, if anything, for whether there was an opportunity to add a cat emoji into a cat meme, into a slide, you kind of have to take it. But if you are going to be training customers on products, on software, then this mild or hot take, depending on your hot sources, it must be hands on. You know, when participants are engaging directly with the software, they're more likely to retain what they've learned, and so that hands on, learning experience is going to it's going to reinforce the concepts through the practice, which is going to build the muscle memory. It's going to help deeper understanding compared to other delivery methods, like sort of seminars, lectures, demonstrations, this type of thing. And a little bit later on, I'll be talking a little bit more about this kind of secondary point, but also hopefully builds confidence in problem built problem solving skills when it comes to the product itself, because ultimately, these people are going to be working on that by themselves without you present at some stage. But we'll talk about that a little bit more, and yes, agreement in the chat as well. Fantastic. Again, probably not a hot take, a very simmer intake at best. So let's talk about the engagement framework for VRT that we've been working with at Meteor ocean. This has been something that's evolved over the sort of almost decade that I've been at that organization.

And some of this may be very familiar to a lot of you as being you know, practitioners in this space may be familiar with some of the kind of parts of this framework, but maybe a couple of bits, maybe not so much, or didn't consider it in this type of space. So what we work with is a tell me, show me, let me try, let me explore, review and test me model. So that's that's our framework for the actual engagement of the hands on elements within the virtual instructor led training. So let's just kind of start to break those down a little bit and talk about some very kind of high level points when it when it comes to this. So when we're looking at the tell me component of it. This is when we are instructing somebody of what is the task at hand that they're going to be performing on the product or the software itself. Firstly, you kind of always have to start with the what's in it. For me, the with them, the big picture. Why is this a very important thing? Why does it matter? And also the fact that it matters really has to be set within some kind of level of job reality. It has to be something that they actually are going to be doing, rather than something that's pretty vague. So what's in it for them? And making sure that those examples are set within reality, trying to minimize the amount of instructions that you give as well. Again, we can only remember so many things at once as human beings. So reducing that down to maybe three or four instructions at one time can be very helpful for the group to be able to follow along and trying not to over explain and repeat, which is very tricky when you've been an instructor for some time. You do like to continue to talk and talk through these things, but allowing that time for people to actually digest that information and figure out exactly what they need to do to be able to process that. Now, when we're showing we also want to make sure that we are visualizing those instructions as well. So we're showing exactly how to do things within the product, within the software, but we also want to make sure those instructions are visible there, the prompts are visible so that people can go back to them in case they get lost or stuck. Of course, we want to check for clarity before we start to get a little bit further on. But also something that works really well is that encouragement of failure as well. We're trying to build, you know, connect them with the participants that we have on this training session, and ultimately, whenever you learn anything new, there can be sometimes, a lot of failure that comes with that. And we don't want people to feel like they're they are themselves a failure because they couldn't learn a software that they've never used before in their entire life. So we want to really encourage people to get stuck in, give it a go. If they go wrong, that's perfectly fine, because that then provides you with opportunities to support the group and provide essentially learning outcomes from that. So that's the first couple of bits here. Then we're going to move on to the let me try aspect, which is then actually do. Doing it. So some independent practice there. This is where you would back away as an instructor and only come in if there is some learning that you really want to kind of reinforce during it, if somebody is doing really well, or if there needs to be some encouragement or acknowledgement through this. But otherwise, we're trying to sort of stand back that these folks give it a go. And ultimately we do when they're trying. Want to give them the opportunity to have a couple of goes in terms of practice as well. So it's not just a one and done again. We want to try and build that muscle memory. So can we have a task that is repeatable, maybe two, three times, of course, if the whole group is going off track, let's get involved in course correct and course correct if maybe there's a few that are going off track. But as mentioned, those kind of failed moments are learning opportunities. So if somebody is going in complete wrong direction, or the group of them, let's bring it back. Let's talk them through exactly why this has happened, and take it from then the let me explore components. So once we've got them comfortable with that, that task at hand, we give them the opportunity to go off and play effectively, which maybe is not the right word for working within software and products, is playing, but going off to explore themselves can hopefully increase their progression to be much faster, because again, ultimately, these people are going to be kind of alone with that product, with that software after the training, and so to be able to give them the time to go off and see click around, what does that button do? What does that button do? Kind of pique their interest and get them more just generally interested in your product or software is pretty cool. And say they may pick up extra features and functionality, but it's building that comfort that comes from that exploration phase. And then we come to the review. So we've we've gone through those stages. They've had a go, they've had an exploration. We want to come back. We want to talk about the task at hand, and also maybe some of the things that have come from the exploration as well. Because again, you may be kind of talking through, providing some commentary behind this. We want to discuss all that we've kind of covered in that section, what we what we did, why we did it, what went well? If there's any kind of extra learns from that that we want to kind of break into the group. We want to do that check in with a group on their general comfort with what they've covered. And if you've got that feeling that maybe they're not so comfortable, then let's redo the task, or maybe find the opportunity to repeat that somehow. With this, you'll notice I haven't got anything for test me, so this is where my lovely poll should come back up again. So if you weren't unable to participate in the first poll, hopefully you'll be able to participate in this second one. Fingers crossed. If it's not working for whatever reason, then do use the chat and pop some comments in there. But otherwise, if you scan the QR code with your phone, it should be a word cloud. So I'd love to know from yourselves as the variant experiences, some very experienced, some fairly experienced, what kind of ways could you test your participants in a live training session to make sure they've kind of understood the task at hand, and then before you move on? So feel free to use the word cloud. If you don't want to use the word cloud, use the chat Renee ask questions, absolutely. So kind of a, Q, a would be very good. I

Speaker 1  
survey,

Dan Braithwaite  
yeah, so checking in to see what their kind of comfort levels are. There different scenarios, cool, teach back. Yes, that's another way you could do it. So can we get, maybe someone to get up in front of folks to do so, apply a scenario or case study that requires the skills they've learned. Kim, that's, that's pretty cool. I like that one. Get somebody to demonstrate, yeah, real time quizzes, almost like the one we're using now, sort of, kind of, I don't know, tenuous, tenuous role plays absolutely so that started going quite small now. So there's lots of different ways that we can sort of test the audience, test the participants to make sure that they're they're good, they're ready before we move on to the next topic. Don't worry, I'm not going to test you all. So that's not going to be part of this, but that is the engagement framework that we use for delivering virtual instructor led training. So again, that's the tell me, starting with very clear instructions, the what's in it for them, why it all matters. So in them, the show me demonstrating the task visually, allowing learners to see precisely how a task is performed, so they can get that build a little bit of confidence before they give it a go. Then allowing. Them to practice independently and kind of pitching in with some commentary from time to time, giving the opportunity to repeat the task a couple of times as well before giving them the opportunity to explore so make some mistakes, discover some additional functionality, get build some confidence and comfort in there before kind of review and test me, which are kind of very much together in that, in that kind of circle there, but wrapping up to make sure everyone's very comfortable with what's been gone through, and that you as the instructor are comfortable that the audience, the participants themselves, have taken away everything that they are meant to take away.

Luis Malbas  
All right,

Dan Braithwaite  
so next up that is the engagement framework for the ILT. But how do we actually design for virtual instructor led training? And so I'll take you through some of the kind of best practices and a structure that we've implemented over the years, and that stuff that's kind of been adapting over time. I'm going to come in with another thought, take or mild take here again, depending on people's thoughts. But I all too often hear on LinkedIn, on maybe some talks, not from this event, for sure, but from some other talks I've been to in conferences where folks will say attention spans are decreasing, and they're not. Let's let's be real. Attention spans are not decreasing. And I like to use the Oppenheimer example here of the Oscar winning movie that is over three hours long, which made millions and millions of dollars in the cinema. If people's attention spans were decreasing, then how could somebody sit through Oppenheimer? How could somebody binge watch Game of Thrones? How could somebody read a book for a couple of hours in the evening? This is not an attention span problem at all, but it is a tolerance issue that is now kind of getting bigger and bigger, and this is really the, you know, ultimately, the world has changed. Kind of modern media has kind of taught us to be better at filtering out stuff that's not really relevant to us. Again, Tiktok is something that's very popular. We can just swipe it away if we're not interested in it, but it is that kind of, if we don't feel interested in it, we just want to be done with it as soon as possible. We're busy people. We want to move on with our lives. So when we're thinking about designing for for a V, I, L, T session, you know, it's not about kind of keeping it as short and sweet as possible. You can have a longer the IoT session, in fact, where I work, most of our sessions are around 90 minutes to two hours in length. But if you can make sure that it is relevant to them and get them brought in as quickly as possible, then you can hold people for a longer period of time, so we don't have to work what? So we can worry about the Tiktok generation. As long as the content is relevant and is seen to be relevant, as soon as possible, then we'll be in a good place. Cool, preach it. Dan, thank you very much. And Abby, if you get the buyer, they will pay attention. Absolutely. It's all about that buying. Why? Why are they here? They're here to learn a product. Why are they here to learn a product? Because they have to use it as part of their jobs, and what part of what? What are the jobs that they're doing that this product is going to help them with all the problems that it's going to be solving for them. We've got to get all of that up front and then we can hold their attention for a longer period of time. But it is absolutely not an attention span problem at all. It is a tolerance issue. We are not as horrible as maybe we used to be in the past. So when we're looking at designing this event, this live training session, we really, again, want to design it for the immediate need. What are those tasks that are going to be completed by that person, and ultimately, immediately after this training has ended, so they can take that what they've learned, take it straight into the product, and execute as soon as possible. Now again, we mentioned earlier on about keeping instructions down to maybe three to four instructions. We can only absorb so much information as human beings, so trying to keep it down to two kind of or three core concepts or core actions, chunks the information down, making it easier for folks to learn. It also makes it easier for you, as the instructor, to evaluate the success of your class. As well, you have the ability to see if, if these two or three core actions have been performed very well by the group, then actually everyone has covered the learning objectives nicely, and you can feel confident that they're going to have a great deal of success working in the software product afterwards. So just keeping it narrowed down to two or three core actions and allowing them to use the framework where you have those multiple steps. Groups to work your way through, so that gives you time to then build in exploration and other bits and pieces with that.

But yes, if you're going to be holding people for 90 minutes or two hours, you're probably going to want to take a break. Me getting older, I'd love to take a break during sessions. And because, you know, getting older, ultimately, I'd love to get another drink, maybe a snack, whatever I need to, kind of get through the rest of it. And what I kind of want to say here is this, no necessarily hard and fast rule when it comes to breaks. And you know, if you're doing a 90 minute session or 90 minute class, maybe you want to be aiming for 45 minutes to 60 minutes in if it's a two hour class, maybe you're aiming between 70 to 90 minutes. But it's all about being flexible and adaptable. You know, trying to read that group, read the participation levels of that group, if they're speaking to you through the service that you're using as maybe that conversation started to window a little bit. If they're using the chat as the chat started to dry up a little bit, trying to gage what exactly is the engagement levels. If you've got webcams on again, can you see some wandering eyes? Can you see some phones up in the air, just trying to get an idea from the group, and ultimately being adaptable to that as well, because, again, there is also some classes that may speed by, and actually may then consider that actually we might be able to complete this content much quicker, and actually for this group, that would be a better win for the group, or sometimes a group that is going slower, maybe we might need to take a couple of very smaller breaks instead, so be adaptable to the needs, but also checking in with that group as well. What do they need? Do they need a break? They need a bit of time to digest that information. But once you're going to do a break, a kind of advice here is to break during one of the core activities, but actually to break at the just after the show me component of the engagement framework. So you've gone through and told them what it is you're going to cover. Now, what I would say here is make sure you tell them you're going to break beforehand. Don't just hit them with the break mic drop, because that probably won't work out pretty well in this situation. But tell them that you're going to be going to a break. Once you've done you've told them something, you've got to throw them something, and that they're going to come back and attempt that thing when they come back. And the reason for this is that you may have experienced this yourselves in some situations, when you've had a break in a training session, it feels like you've got to get a bit of effort going. And even as an instructor, sometimes you've got to kind of pick up the engagement in the group. And we're going to now, we're going to start this new activity, and we're going to get going, and you've got to kind of get everyone up and running for it. Whereas by doing it this way, you've already started the activity. They already know what they've got to do when they come back, and they can just try and get on with it straight away. They're already active. They're already engaging. Straight away. After that break that might be that they come back and stay. Some of them tell them they can't remember exactly what they need to be doing. You might need to reiterate some of the previous steps, maybe a little bit of a demonstration, or tell me. But ultimately, you're trying to get that group to come back in and start straight away and kind of pick up as quickly as possible. So that's a kind of tip there when it comes to breaks. And yeah, no, PowerPoint presentation can be complete without an image of Tom Cruise. That is a PowerPoint 101, masterclass there, um, quick show of hands or things in the chat comments. In the chat, how many of you have seen the movie Edge of Tomorrow?

Okay, so we've got a yes, a, no, a, yes,

Luis Malbas  
thumbs up, no, okay, that's not

Dan Braithwaite  
all right. Well, there is a, it is very cool, and it should be on your list. It is a fantastic movie, 7.9 on IMDb. I believe it's 90 or 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, if those things influence your decision in any way that is good, or if your friends and colleagues in the community mention it in the chat, influences you, let it influence you. It is a very good movie. They also seem to be doing a sequel. I don't really understand how the sequel is going to work. That is not a spoiler. I just don't really get it, but I'm sure it'll be fine. How does this relate to what I'm trying to explain here? Dubiously, dubiously. But if you have seen the movie, or you haven't seen the movie, the very basic non spoiler. Premise is that Tom Cruise's character, which is just basically Tom Cruise, because Tom Cruise effectively plays himself in pretty much every movie these days, I'm sure we can agree, is fighting against an aliens, and he must relive the same day over and over again. Um, it's like Groundhog Day, but with Tom Cruise, um, although every day he dies, so every day, he gets a little bit closer to start getting to the power source and ultimately stopping this alien race. Still, like I've kind of explained it, but there's a bit more to it than that, and then you've got an elite soldier helping along the way. My point being is that revisions have got to happen with your content, with your structure, with what you do, you reiterate over time. So in the same way that Tom Cruise gets ever so slightly closer to that alien at the end to confront them and save the day, you can also save the training day by getting feedback and confirm I told you it was a very weak weak weak link, but ultimately trying to revise over time, getting that ever so slightly closer to a much better engaged model. So ultimately, this is when we think back to me, even like 1015, years ago when it comes to trading. Yeah, I mean, many of you may may remember going out on site for two free days, clients, offices, flying around the whole of America to go and visit people, and that was the world that we were in. And at the time, we all thought that was the right thing to do. And then this pesky pandemic kicked in, and then we all had to kind of jump into this new world and try to figure out the virtual side of doing things, and suddenly these four or five hour seminars weren't going to work in this new world, and we've had to revise and reiterate and kind of get to these new places. And that's certainly in a journey that we've been at a media ocean as well, is kind of learning over the years what works and doesn't work and what works for our instructors as well as our users as well. So in multiple ways that you can do this, of course, in the session itself, you can get some initial kind of feelings for what's going on, the actual content that you're covering. What maybe stumbled people a little bit is that something you found in other classes making making notes of that there's this core topic and this instruction maybe doesn't quite work the way I thought it would. Maybe it's me. Maybe next time, I'll try introducing that topic a bit differently, or introducing the instruction differently, or maybe actually, I've talked to my colleagues and they're feeling the same way about this particular part of the the live training. So maybe we need to revise that, because it feels like it's going a little bit flat in the moment. In the moment. Maybe some instantaneous feedback you can get as well. I mean, think traditionally, kind of known as the happy sheets, but getting some survey feedback immediately at the end of session, just to kind of gage the effectiveness of the content, the delivery of that content, also the relevance as well. You know, you you've kind of kind of building this and reiterating over time. You've got experience of perhaps talking to different teams internally to make sure that the content really is focused on the jobs that these people are going to be doing, but maybe they evolved a little bit from the last time this type of thing was looked into. So let's get some feedback on the relevancy in the moment as well. Can we kind of revise what we're talking about and doing or based on that. But also with surveys, comes potentially the opportunity to do a survey a little bit later on as well. So it's all good doing the one straight afterwards, because we can remember a lot more immediately in the moment. But we also like to do a survey 90 days later as well. And of course, as you would probably think, response rates drop pretty dramatically when it comes to that, but the quality of response is a lot different, because three months later, what was the effectiveness of this class in terms of the content that was covered, the delivery maybe might not be remembered as much, but the relevancy of that content and the effectiveness in that person's job immediately afterwards is very apparent two to three months after they've taken or training sessions. So as a kind of tip, if you're not doing that, I would definitely recommend it. Do expect your response rates to be pretty low, though, but actually, the quality of the response that you get is really, really awesome. And again, we can get anecdotal feedback from internal departments as well about what things are changing, how things are evolving. But you kind of check out things like support tickets, of course, as well what the things that are trending there, from a support ticket perspective, is that stuff that's in the training, not in the training, discussing internally how you can evolve with that, and things like product usage as well. If you're able to pull out product usage statistics as well, can you do something with that? Is the workflow that you're describing not actually what the users end up doing is what's the reason behind that? Let's investigate so lots of different ways that you can be Tom, COVID. Cruise in the Edge of Tomorrow, and I hope that those of you that haven't watched it will watch it a little bit later on. So this is the structure, then, of a VRT session, including the what we talked about, the engagement framework that's sort of in this what you might slightly have picked up on is this talk is trying to mirror this as much as possible. That was my intent behind this. So we started with introduction, icebreaker. We had a little kind of activity to begin with to assess the knowledge levels within there. If you do know that you're going to have people that are turning up a little bit later and you really need to hold back, trying to have a few kind of other ice breaker type things, discussion bits that you can get going. I always like to ask people what they're streaming, what they're what they're reading, what they're listening to, those types of things which can then engage conversations in the chat or verbally, if people are there. So do try to have a couple of extra ones, just in case. Maybe there is somebody that you know is meant to be there who's running late, and you kind of have to hold off, which is a bit annoying, but starting with that activity. So that's what we did in this talk. We assessed the knowledge, and we got some very knowledge, but mostly nobody with no experience, but they're fair experience, somewhat experienced and very experienced. We then covered what the learning objective, or learning objectives would be, and then we went into that engagement framework. And as we mentioned, with the engagement framework, you're looking to really only do this with the core topics two or three times. We don't want to be doing it too much more than that, then we'll get to a stage where we recap the entire learning objective, and it's providing that supplementary content as well. Again, not everything is going to be able to be processed in that moment. There are going to be things that need to be taken away. Do you have a help center? Do you have PDFs that you could share, video resources you can link out to? Do you have a university or Academy LMS site that you can send people to that have courses, or maybe this is part of the course they need to come back to. So how can we support these people after today? We can't just expect them to take what they've just done and go ahead and use it straight away forever. We need to give them some more information, or point them to places where things are going to be and then a memorable ending, which we will come on to. But all of this would be fairly useless if we scheduled ineffectively. And this is a really important point. Here is that you could have the most engaging class, the most engaging instructor, you can have just this wonderful experience that everyone has. They've learned so much. It's been absolutely brilliant. Turns out they don't use your product or software for another two weeks, and the whole thing is redundant. And many of you have heard of the forgetting curve, the different percentages within that, you know, they some of these percentages are pretty dramatic. You know, maybe as much as 50% of information is lost within an hour, within 24 hours, almost up to 70% of information can be lost. So again, great piece of advice. Don't trade on a Friday afternoon, because that person is going to take that information into the weekend, and that information is probably not going to come very much far on a Monday morning for them. So trying to schedule things in the most effective way that we can get that person to get trained. And maybe they've got then some time after the train session, maybe it's the afternoon, or maybe whatever that looks like, to actually get in and start playing around with it. And that involves, obviously, conversations with the customers themselves to find out what exactly is going on. And if you do have people that come to your training session that tell you, I'm not going to be using this for a few weeks, they're more than obviously welcome to stay, but you absolutely invite them back, because ultimately this is going to go horribly wrong for them in terms of their memory. So yeah, that is tip around scheduling for effectiveness. Just remember the forgetting curve. Make it as close as you can in terms of time to when they're actually going to be doing what they're supposed to be doing.

All right, so we've gonna have a little bit of a buffer in terms of time at the end, which is nice. We've covered the engagement framework. We've covered design in a couple more bits to kind of check off. But Oh, somebody's already voted, so that's that's cool. So this was my learning objective for the beginning. I want to see if folks would take away one thing from what we've covered so far. So if you could scan the QR code, that would be great and answer the question. If the answer is no, I will not be hurt. But I'm hoping for a few yeses. If the QR code doesn't work for you, then please pop it in the chat with a yes, but at least this way is. Anonymous. So if you do say no, I don't get your name, and feel like you've hurt me or anything like, none of that cool. So we've got a few people already coming in that they've learned one thing, which is, wasn't that Rihanna's song? It was Anne Marie. I think I can't remember who it was. 2000s pop reference, memory. Anyway, if you remember who that was by, feel free to pop that in the chat, because that's going to bug me. Now, I'm probably got to Google that after this session. Who did the song one thing, I'm pretty sure it was Anne Marie. All right, so for those of you that have taken one thing away from the session, I would love to know what it was that you took away from this session. So same QR code on the scan. There is also the URL as well. You can pop the URL into a browser window if you would prefer, or feel free to use the chat here, whichever is easiest for you. But I'd love to know what specifically or in excess. Yeah, there's a there's a reference. So I'd love to know what was the one takeaway, or if you've got multiple takeaways, this should actually allow you to give multiple takeaways into the into this software as well. So we'd love to know what exactly you kind of took away from this. What was that secret sauce to watch Edge of Tomorrow. It is, it is blooming good. It really is. I mean, Tom Cruise doesn't really go wrong too much of the time, does he. I mean, there's the odd one, like the mummy, which that's never speak of why that got remade at all. Okay, so we've got frameworks, and the framework was pretty useful for someone that's really nice. Simon, and a formative assessing along the way. The framework, perfect.

Luis Malbas  
Nice,

Dan Braithwaite  
structured suggestions for the beginning, nice, the framework of an explanation. Mark, yes, i

Luis Malbas  
Yes, story, oh. Framework again, nice. Framework for the wind, very cool, very cool, all right,

Dan Braithwaite  
well, feel free if you want to carry on with that, or pop some bits in the chat. And, oh, I also like the review aspect, and it's a good idea. Cool, fantastic. Thank you, Kim. I appreciate that. So I want to finish with a couple of final bits before we maybe open up if there's any Q and A or whatever we kind of want to do at the end here, I mentioned before about memorable ending, finishing the session, not necessarily on a thank you slide, which seems to be what a lot of people do. We get to the end we have that generic, branded Thank you slide. There it is, see you later, but actually trying to finish up on something very poignant. Maybe there's some very specific points within those core topics that if they could only simply just remember these three or four things from the core topics you've covered, if they just remember these three or four things, they will be successful. And there's that theory around you know, people will generally remember the start and end of things the best. Maybe sometimes we're going to be hazy in the middle. So if you think of that the ending, if you finish with just a thank you slide, you've maybe lost a moment where maybe somebody might have remembered more or taken something more away from it in that moment. So what I wanted to finish off with, and I popped my LinkedIn on there. If you do want to scan the QR code and carry on the conversation with me on LinkedIn. You're more than welcome to I'm happy to chat jump on calls, not a consultant. I don't charge any money. I just love talking about this industry. I love connecting with communities like this one to learn more from you as well as try to see if I can help as well. So but the biggest thing is, the most important thing is you. You as the instructor, you know that the best design content scheduled in the best possible way would fall completely flat with a passive, unengaged instructor that doesn't want to do the job. It is all about you. So many experiences these days are digitalized. We've got AI taking over the world. The robots are in control. But there's nothing more important than human connection. And so in these virtual environments where distractions are everywhere, I think the human aspect is something that we all crave. So the most important thing when it comes to all of this is ultimately you, your personality, your empathy, the connection that you build with your audience, to foster that trust and participation. So that's what I wanted to end this on, is it's all about you. And yeah, if there are any questions, feel free to chuck them in, and I'll be happy to answer them. But thank you very much for participating. Dan,

Luis Malbas  
this was great. This is a great session. Thank you so much. I. I'm, you know, like, we have actually had at least one vi LT conference through tldc. I think it's been a couple years, but I think that this is one of the, you know, out of that group, like, as far as tips and everything, this is fantastic. Was there anything specific that you were wanting to get out of presenting at tldc, was it just to make connections? Or,

Dan Braithwaite  
yeah, making connections. I think you know this. This so much that we can learn from each other. And I found from joining communities over the last few years and networking more that people in the field of learning, development, customer education, we we all just want to talk to each other. We all want to share what we're doing and and some things may work for others that may not work for others, but we just want to talk. We want to explore these ideas. We're very passionate professionals when it comes to this field. So I just love connecting with people and say, if I can help anyone brilliant, but also if somebody's got something that they've got a secret sauce that I can learn from and incorporate. I want to kind of take that as well. So yeah, that's really the big influence for me. It's just everyone helping everyone. Again, obviously, as humans, that is kind of what we should do. So yeah, that's

Luis Malbas  
great. So I think if you are going to go to dev learning this fall, you should, I mean, I don't know. Might be, it might still be open, but there's they usually have a call for speakers, because you would do great over there. That's something to consider and and, yeah, I'm glad that that you are interested in connecting with folks through communities, because that's basically what, what you know, tldc is built on. One thing that I've learned is that, you know, there isn't any really one person that should be that is like the smartest, smartest individual in the room. It's just like everybody has value in in the community. So I love being able to just help facilitate that and and and find folks to just like to spotlight and to lift up. So, so, yeah, Dan, it was great to have you close out. Close out this event.

Dan Braithwaite  
Awesome. And thank you very much for accepting me and having me as well. Seems like a pretty vibrant community, so I'm really glad to be part of it as well. Yeah,

Luis Malbas  
we have fun. We have fun for sure. All right, everybody. So don't forget Edge of Tomorrow. I think it might still be on Netflix. They might have taken it off,

Dan Braithwaite  
but it's on one of them.

Luis Malbas  
It has, like, some great re watch ability value too, so you might want to watch it more than once, and and, yeah, that framework. I'm definitely going to go over this again. I love that framework. I'm so glad that you shared that with us. It was a really, really top notch session. So thanks, Dan, awesome.

Dan Braithwaite  
Thank you so much. All

Luis Malbas  
right, well, I'm gonna go ahead and close out the session. Everyone, thanks again for being a part of the conference. Everyone, if you haven't watched all of the sessions, make sure you go back and check out the recordings. You can do that here in the Crowdcast platform. I'll have it up for a little while, and then, you know, at least a week or so, maybe probably more, and then you could so you can watch them, and then I'll also have them on the tldc website soon, so you can go back there to check them out. Members can as well. So thanks everyone. Thanks, Matt, and yeah, no snow sessions tomorrow, so have a great weekend. And yeah, I'm going to start putting together the accessible, inclusive design conference for the summer. So hopefully, just keep an eye out for the proposals for that, and hopefully we'll see everybody then. Thanks, everyone.

Speaker 1  
Take care. Dan. Take care.