Toby Lewis, managing director of LiveInteractive, discusses the value of audience engagement technology for HR professionals.
E-learning has fast become an efficient and proven method of training and teaching across a wide range of target audiences, both internally and externally. The ability to deliver set programmes using multimedia delivers huge benefits in terms of cost saving, improved attendance rates and greater recognition of the material.
One of the big challenges for the HR professional, however, is keeping pace with the advancements in technology to ensure that the e-learning workshop or conference forum is as interactive and engaging as possible to maintain active learning in the future.
The technology available to assist in the delivery of these training programmes is constantly evolving, providing HR professionals with the best and most innovative tools to assist in e-learning workshops and encourage a much greater degree of feedback and response.
Embracing innovation
E-learning is commonly associated with ‘advanced learning technology’, which refers to the technology and associated methodologies of learning using multimedia. Audience engagement technologies are an emerging e-learning tool where electronic materials and face-to-face sessions are combined. They enable prior planning and deliver content in an original way to encourage interaction and facilitate the sharing of opinions and ideas during and after an event.
The simplest form of audience engagement is via handheld voting systems called ‘palmlets’. These offer ‘yes’, ‘no’ and multiple choice answer options. Cost-effective, reliable and delivering quick quantitative results, the systems are now becoming common place at internal and external events. The key advantages include:
- Small compact size
- Suitable for audiences of any size
- Captures individual quantitative responses
- Immediately displays aggregated data to the whole audience.
The leading providers in the event field have now developed this concept further and have introduced tablet PC audience engagement systems, making free text response generation a possibility. This provides far more results, ideas and opinions, ensuring that all voices in a forum are heard and that comments are captured and shared straight away:
- Free text and voting capabilities
- Compact sized tablet PC with touch screen interface
- Used by individuals or in group working format
- Delivers qualitative and quantitative responses
- Ideas and opinions are captured instantly.
Audience engagement systems can also be seen as a tool for blended learning as the table top tablets provide multiple avenues for the delivery of development plans, catering for a variety of people’s preferred learning methods. Learning stimuli such as movies, pictures, sound clips and even the internet can be easily accessed. This can enhance interest, help develop discussions and is a source for reference and further information.
Encouraging two-way dialogue
Audience engagement systems provide a powerful tool to shape e-learning sessions by offering a two-way dialogue between HR professionals and company personnel. They enable prior planning, deliver content in an original way, encourage interaction, and facilitate the sharing of opinions and ideas during and after an event. The benefits speak for themselves:
More interaction
Individuals or groups can interact with a trainer, asking questions instantly via the system, undertaking exercises and absorbing content by looking at documents or film clips sent to the system screens. In large group formats this eliminates the need for hand-raising to ask questions, reducing inhibitions and encouraging greater interaction.
Knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing is also enhanced as groups can communicate with each other directly through the system. The improved internal communications will often lead to the generation of new ideas and insightful views into ways of working, learning and moving the organisation forward.
Greater productivity
The systems eliminate the need for people to break off into groups or move into separate rooms. Several group activities can be run in the same room as different questions can be electronically sent to multiple units. This not only reduces breakout room budgets, multiple trainer or facilitator costs and specific venue searching, but it also saves time. Group or individual responses can be touch typed onto the screen of the tablet PC and fed into the engagement system instantly.
Instant results
Results can be presented on screens to encourage response and reaction. Group working is harnessed much more quickly and can then be shared again across the whole event for further refining.
Tailored events ‘on the fly’
HR professionals can also tailor an event to the audience’s needs, identifying issues from the feedback and focussing more on specific themes where there is greater need, leading to a more productive session.
Planning and reporting
An important aspect of engagement is also to assist with prior planning, long before the actual training session starts. Specialist audience engagement players see the live event as just one part of the learning mix where planning beforehand and evaluation afterwards delivers great value.
Months before a training session, micro websites or mailers capture people’s views on what they want to get from the training session. This helps ‘shape the agenda’. The content can then be tailored to meet all needs and ensures the live learning forum commences at full speed.
Audience engagement systems also gather information and feedback from the sessions that can be incorporated into policies or plans at a strategic level or used to set new training agendas. Given the rapid nature of this type of feedback, it is automatically collated into the post session reports where trends, observations and demographics can be easily converted into graphs and graphics for simple analysis.
LiveInteractive is part of the Live Group Plc, a specialist event agency delivering over 400 integrated events a year. Seminars on engaging with the audience are regularly run.
