I began writing this post about two years before Covid-19, so I decided to scrap the original post and start again. This is a little unusual, I don’t like totally rewriting but this was worth revisiting. When face-to-face classes were suspended at universities, colleges and schools, students were required to continue their studies at home. This worked ok for the richer first-world nations, the outcomes for students in developing nations were unbelievably compromised.

Vocational education and training along with higher education had been slowly transitioning to online classes. Workplace based training and development has been pushing the technology constraints, unfortunately, state government colleges have failed to embrace technology. University students have the option of online or face-to-face classes so university students can optimise their time.

Mining companies have been utilising online site inductions for some time now, for me it is far better than losing a day of site time, I don’t mind doing the online site induction in my own time. Sure beats a three day face-to-face induction as I can race through the mundane information and just concentrate on what I don’t know.

As a learning and development graduate in 2014, I was exposed to current technology and practices. Whilst six years has passed, some of the systems we learnt used better technology than we use now, we didn’t have Zoom, although we had a video collaboration program.

As Zoom took over, despite its inherent faults, it was an instant success. Google released their premium service Meet, Cisco Webex had already been used by businesses for some time. For business, this was a natural progression as they were already using conferencing programs. Collaborative programs are now so common in business, it is not unusual anymore, people just accept it, so it is really well suited for learning.

Facilitators with no online experience were forced online, this led to poor outcomes for students and trainees. The learning content was outdated, not suited for online delivery and poorly constructed. Instructional design is mandatory for quality student outcomes, any educational and training institution not employing instructional designers treats their students with disdain.

What worked was organisations with online learning expertise, experience and processes. There is nothing wrong with online delivery for many courses. Whilst MOOCs were well received early, the clientele was mostly post-graduate learners and not new learners. They are motivated and well suited to online knowledge-based delivery as they have base knowledge, skills and abilities who are seeking to unskilled. As we move to more flexible delivery methodologies, online delivery is both a cost and time effective mode of delivery.