Using virtual class rooms for delivery to remote and regional areas.

As a food safety trainer who has been working across 14 countries over the last 30 years, I started using virtual technology to deliver training in 2017. This was after a request for HACCP training to meet a specific client need (after their work hours, 2 day fully assessed and registered). I said why not ? and we managed to pull it off using SKYPE. The time zones worked perfectly, and the client even made a video, on their IPAD, of their workplace that she shared so that we could review the Critical Control Points together.

Months later another request from a client in the Caribbean. This plant was 2 full flying days (each way) from our office, so virtual training was the only realistic option. The requested training covered two different courses for a large group of staff. The time zones were quite difficult so we worked in 4 hour slots across a number of days. Together we designed the training course to meet the client’s certification requirements with practical site-based activities for the staff to undertaken in groups.

After the success of these courses, ICS broadened the offering of virtual training. In Australia we have a huge country with food production sites in remote areas, where it can be very difficult and expensive to get from A to B just to attend a 2 day training course. ICS also have clients scattered across small remote Pacific island countries who require regular training to meet their food safety certification requirements. We also receive requests from individual students located in countries where no European trainer wants to travel to and that they find to next to impossible to access a travel visa to a country like Australia.

Since these early virtual courses, the ICS team have used a number of different virtual training software packages.  After a few disasters we now use, Zoom, the Safe-Food Training Hub and MS Teams for specific clients who are not allowed to use Zoom. The software has not been chosen on the basis of how many “features” exist but on how simple and “intuitive” it is to use & how little bandwidth is required.

So what have the ICS virtual trainers learnt to ensure success in the delivery in all locations ? The tips listed below may seem obvious and simple, yet many people do not think about these issues.

-Talk to the clients and work out their needs and wants first. Always discuss internet strength, reliability and bandwidth.

-Always check exact time zones i.e. city to city on a “time converter” so that you don’t miss changes due to daylight saving and make sure everyone knows the date i.e. the USA can be up to a day behind the South Pacific.

-Often better to work in 4 hour time slots to meet time zone constraints and minimise “screen fatigue”.

-Have all training material, including copies of PPT, to the students in advance. ICS uses a specific LMS (Learning Management System) to make this process easier for the students. This enables the students to review the material and come up with questions. Tell the students which parts of the training material should be printed out for the day.

-Be prepared for all disasters including but not limited to: power outage, net access dropping out and cease working at all ends.

-Having the PPT in the hands of every student and having every students mobile phone number means that if necessary you can keep running the training without power or net access. It happens.

-Explain any assessment well in advance so every student has access to their own laptop and training materials if required i.e. BRCGS exam.

-Run a practice class beforehand to minimize IT issues on the day.

The group virtual training works best when there is a single coordinator at each end, when the client has a specific training room with a central wide screen that comes with IT support to set all technology (sound, vision) up.

The standard training course material is almost always customised for each client’s needs and interests prior to the course, including the student activities and assessment if required. In terms of course design for virtual delivery, it always works best if practical “action” activities are built in at least every 60 minutes or so. These could be a site security assessment, foreign object audit or allergen review within production areas. Use these as small group activities and get each team to present findings back to the whole group.

The trainer should have every student’s name and role within the workplace prior to the course. Always get every student to introduce themselves (roll call) at the start and call on each student by name along the way to answer questions or make comments. Often students vanish along the way, swap laptops or extra students turn up. ICS is now recording many training sessions to enable the students to come back later (on the ICS LMS) and watch the training again. It is ideal that every student leaves their live cameras on throughout the training, but this can chew up bandwidth and sometimes just is not possible.

Remember that people learn in different ways (hearing ,seeing, doing….) so trainers must build that into the course design accounting for the added complexity of virtual training, is the very wide skill set (or lack of) in the student group using computers as learning tools.

About the author: Clare Winkel has worked in the food industry since 1987, from the meat processing floor up including at Australian Government departments, private consultancies and as a GFSI auditor & trainer. Clare started training meat processing workers in 1994 and has carried out food safety training for indigenous fish process workers on the beach, under palm trees with wandering children, dogs & chickens. Twenty years later some of these children still remembered the training and were then running the seafood factory on their island. Career Highlight: spent 6 hours on the Bering Sea in a crab trawler aka ‘Deadliest Catch” Crab boat and did not throw up.