Let’s Talk About Virtual Classroom Replay Videos

Some Background

During the pandemic, many organizations implemented or expanded their virtual classroom and remote learning capabilities. In the rush to implement technology to support students during the pandemic, a significant number of organizations failed to assess their requirements to support remote delivery of their education and training programs. As a result, the majority of these organizations implemented meeting room technologies; not technologies designed to provide education and training.

Meeting room technologies simply do not provide the basic tools needed to engage remote learners. In an effort to provide some ability to measure student achievement following these virtual meeting room sessions, organizations leveraged their Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver “post-session” exams. Numerous studies and reports documented the dismal results of these "meeting room" education and training programs.

Virtual Meeting Room Replay Videos

The recordings produced by virtual meeting room technologies are simple replay videos. They are designed to provide a record of a business or sales meeting. They are not designed to support education or training requirements.

A significant number of organizations attempted to leverage their meeting room replay videos to satisfy training requirements for students that did not attend the live training session. This approach produces unsatisfactory results. Students cannot engage with a replay video. There is no way to know if a student is paying attention while the video is playing, even if the technology used requires the student to play the entire video to obtain credit. In most cases, adding an LMS delivered, post-video exam reinforced this concern.

An Alternative

Unlike meeting room technologies, true virtual classroom systems are designed to support education and training. In a paper titled “How to Provide Effective Virtual Classroom and Remote Learning”, I discussed methods to increase student engagement during a virtual or remote learning session to produce significantly better outcomes from these types of programs. Engaging programs include interactive elements to ensure student participation and enable the instructor to measure individual student learning accomplishment. These programs include competitive games, student exercises, frequent quizzes, simulations, interactive media and exams. Technologies that enable instructors to control, narrate and monitor student achievement for each of these elements during the live session produce superior results. By assigning weights and scoring interactive elements, instructors and students know where they stand.

The recorded sessions produced by these types of technologies are full eLearning lessons, not simple replay videos. They are engaging, they fully simulate the live training session, and can be relied upon to ensure student achievement of learning objectives. The higher-end technologies support learning standards, like SCORM, to enable organizations to leverage their Learning Management System (LMS) for assignment, tracking and reporting of student enrollments and achievement.

Summary

Over the past two years, the use of remote learning technologies has increased significantly. Fast implementation of virtual meeting room technologies to satisfy emergent education, training and testing requirements during the pandemic produced dismal results. The replay videos from these technologies proved to be of little value for education and training purposes. True virtual classroom systems are designed to support education and training. They provide the tools required to engage learners and measure student achievement during the learning session. The more advanced virtual classroom technologies produce interactive eLearning courses from the live virtual classroom sessions. These eLearning lessons achieve results comparable to in-class instruction. These technologies also offer significant cost savings by enabling the organization to deliver live sessions and then leverage the eLearning lesson generated for an unlimited number of future students

How to Get Started

Of course we would love to work with your organization, but the more important issue is taking the first step towards leveraging the methodologies discussed above to support your students and your instructors.?If your company does not have the technology needed to provide your students with recorded versions of your virtual classroom sessions that are true eLearning lessons, we offer an affordable solution. Our technology creates engaging eLearning lessons from your virtual classroom sessions that fully simulate the live event. These lessons can be relied upon to ensure student achievement of learning objectives.?Our technology supports any Learning Management System (LMS) with no integration expense. KMSI has been pioneering these solutions for over 20 years.?

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KMSI provides learning, talent and performance management software solutions, Internet application hosting and professional services. Our service teams are managed by industry leaders implementing proven processes designed to be leveraged across practices. KMSI has designed performance improvement strategies for many of the largest organizations in the world. KMSI provides training development, instructional content conversion and other specialty and implementation services. Visit www.kmsi.com to learn more.