Blended Learning Design: How to Design Effective Blended Online Learning Experiences

If you’ve been designing courses for Corporate L&D, you’ve probably witnessed the rise of blended learning programs. There are very good reasons for this trend: engaging learning experience, learner retention, soft skill development, cost savings and flexibility for learners.

If you’re new to blending in-person training and online learning, or are looking to optimize your blended learning designs, here are steps you should follow to implement and maximize the impact of your blended program.

5 Steps to Design an Effective Blended Learning Experience

Digital transformation has changed nearly every aspect of the business world, from competition to running a business and recruiting new employees.

With the rise of virtual learning, web conferencing tools, and sophisticated learning platforms, the same is true for how employees are developed. The days of having 20 employees sit in a classroom, listening to a live instructor, and going home with an impressive binder of handouts is over.

Or is it?

Should we cancel the in-person workshops and turn our training facilities into employee lounges? Not so fast – let’s not forget that many employees still work in offices, in physical proximity to each other. It is this, in part, which might help explain the growing popularity of blended learning.

Blended learning is often described as a learning program that includes both a self-paced online component and a live component that can be an in-person training session, a live webinar, or some other live component. These different modalities are “blended” together to take advantage of the benefits of each.

If you’re looking to optimize your blended learning designs, here’s how you can maximize their impacts:

1. Create learning outcomes to match organizational needs

It goes without saying that you should start with your desired learning outcomes (e.g., building competence in a particular skill). These should be closely tied to an identified organizational need, such as improving employee retention.

There is a natural tendency to get excited by new technologies or shiny new features and overly focus on how they can be utilized, rather than starting with the big picture (We will discuss technologies in Step 3!). Don’t fall into the trap of innovating for innovation’s sake. Instead, take the time to achieve real clarity on your desired learning outcomes. This will be a solid foundation to determine how you utilize different tools, platforms, and technologies.

2. Determine high-level topics and learning objectives

From the starting point of your desired learning outcomes, determine the scope of topics you will cover to support your goal. For example, if your learning outcome is to improve participants’ presentation skills, you may choose to create modules around content structure, confidence, vocal volume/intonation, nonverbal gestures, eye contact, etc. After choosing the topics, you will need to clarify what you want to emphasize within each topic, as expressed by the learning objectives you set.

3. Understand the benefits of your learning technologies

Take the time to become familiar with your technology options — this will be helpful when you begin to plan the practical logistics around your course. The right learning technology can help make your blended learning program more flexible, scalable, and effective for modern learners. Be sure to consider your current tech stack, as well as explore new ones that will help you deliver and maximize your blended training program.

As you look at technologies, ask yourself these two important questions:

- What are the key differentiating features of this technology? Will it support your organizational needs? For example, are there robust analytics to track user progress through a course?
- What types of learning experiences can this technology enable? For example, does it enable compliance, self-paced, cohort-based, community of practice, simulation or experiential learning, etc.? (See here for 4 things about learning technology that you should know.)

4. Match topics to each medium

Go back to your list of topics. Since you are creating a blended program, you have the luxury of choosing which tools, methodologies, and modalities will be most effective to use for each topic and subtopic.

Compliance or procedure training may be best taught through engaging videos or e-books, reinforced with quizzes. On the other side of the spectrum, a complex skill like “coaching” may be worth allocating precious in-person classroom time, unless you have technology options — like NovoEd — that can allow role-playing, feedback, and video submissions. Topics that are both complex, but are not soft skills, like “financial acumen”, might best be taught via pre-reading and an interactive webinar.

A key element in this step of the process is to question prior assumptions. L&D professionals who have been doing instructor-led training (ILT) for years often say, “I just can’t see how you can teach Topic X effectively online.” This may have been true a few years ago but the world of online corporate learning has dramatically evolved in recent years. In fact, you can often get the same learning results at a lower cost and better scale with blended learning. By keeping an open mind, you will find ways to breathe new life into your training solutions that are better adapted to today’s learners.

By the end of this step, you will have a list of topics, learning objectives, and the methodologies you will use to meet your desired learning outcomes.

5. Design with the medium in mind

Now it’s time to put it all together. A one-hour ILT session, a 45-minute webinar, and an online experiential-based learning experience will each be designed differently even if they cover the same topics and achieve the same learning objectives. For example, with a topic like “Developing Strong Teams”, an ILT session might be designed with slides to teach the concept, and interaction to share examples, with small breakouts to roleplay and receive feedback. A live webinar may encourage a lively attendee chat and real-time response and annotation. On the NovoEd online platform, we might design a module with bite-sized videos or readings to teach the concept, discussion questions to encourage storytelling, practice and application with their real team members, and then reflect and receive in-platform feedback.

Knowing the key strengths (and limitations) of each medium will help you design the most impactful learning content that can truly meet your desired learning outcomes.

3 Success Factors Of Effective Blended Learning Corporate Programs

Once you’ve created a blending learning experience, monitor the success of your program over time to keep your organization on track to meet organizational and training goals.

Keep these three success factors in mind when evaluating the success of your learning program:

1. Utilize the Best of Each Channel (“Play to Strengths”)

As mentioned above, effective blended learning happens when each modality is used for its unique strengths.

Prior to ILT, employees can meet each other online on a learning platform like NovoEd, to introduce themselves, and “flip the classroom” by doing a few readings and watching short videos about the concept of giving feedback. Then, participants head to their local office or webinar to take part in an ILT.
While in-person, they take part in role playing to get comfortable practicing their new skills and receive immediate feedback from their instructor and peers.

Online discussion can continue the conversations started at the ILT. Through project-based assignments, learners can provide feedback to colleagues in real-life situations, then report back and receive feedback online (more on this in Best Practice #3). Gradually, a community forms around this learning journey — and it doesn’t take more flights and room reservations to make it happen.

2. Interweave Program Activities (“Connect the Dots”)

The best synergies in blended learning happen when all the pieces are connected. It’s a simple idea but it requires attention to detail to make sure it’s executed well.

Continuing our example with learning on the NovoEd platform, when pre-work happens online, the ILT trainer reviews it, then highlights specific examples during the in-person session to reinforce the learning. During the ILT, teams begin collaborating on NovoEd’s team workspace to develop their team identity before they go their separate ways to continue the collaboration online. Webinars could even build on topics from the ILT and highlight online discussion posts during the synchronous conversation. Connecting the dots motivates learners to stay engaged through the multiple learning moments and develops excitement at seeing the pieces come together.

Any best-in-class blended design should always have a project-based learning component. In essence, it is the “70” part of the “70-20-10” learning model. Participants should have the opportunity to engage in a structured, real-life application of new concepts in their everyday work, in a safe space. Learners can take what they learned in an ILT or webinar, test it out at work, and still have an ongoing learning community to share the experience, get feedback or encouragement, then try again — within a real work context.

Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to read our Blended Learning Programs article or visit our Learning Experience Design page to learn more.