As promised yesterday, the next question that Serena Gonsalves-Fersch, FLPI and I wanted to answer at the Whatfix :SCALED event last week is below:

Can you help\walkthrough us with a Hybrid Learning plan that you have build & its learnings?

Senthil Raghavan

It’s impossible to craft a complete plan here – not knowing the context or topic makes it all but impossible – but we’ll make some assumptions and see what we come up with. The first assumption is the content and we’ll use a common topic for this – coaching skills.

Coaching is a generic management expectation and contains many common skills. A brief search for coaching skills online will provide a list similar to the skills noted below:

1. Empathy
2. Curiosity
3. Positivity
4. Persistence
5. Innovation
6. Communication
7. Sincerity
8. Guidance
9. Setting the foundation
10. Ethical guidelines
11. Coaching agreement
12. Co-creating the relationship
13. Coaching presence
14. Communicating effectively
15. Active listening
16. Powerful questioning
17. Direct communication
18. Facilitating learning and results
19. Creating awareness
20. Designing actions
21. Planning and goal setting
22. Accountability.

What we would traditionally do in LnD is break each of these elements down into individual content and then group them together as courses. These courses will be face to face and elearning with content that sat outside the course as a ‘resource’, e.g. a video, worksheet etc.

To craft a plan for hybrid, you’d be laying out all the content above at the start. This is the essence of self-determination as opposed to self-direction. Nine years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts that explained this approach and the content crafted here rather serendipitously falls into the reinvention and new models for learning space.

So your plan would be to curate content across each of the topics above. This content will be both active (action learning, briefings, masterclasses, peer coaching, etc) and passive (podcasts, videos, pdfs and briefing notes, etc). Building asynchronous content channels is essential, as is understanding the data capture points in these activities. The plan will need to understand how to collect input, output, outcome and impact data.

You’ll need to design a plan that supports capacity as much as ability; the hybrid learning approach will address the organisational strategy and expected performance improvements having been benchmarking performance before and after coaching. You’ll be looking at the relationships between different parts of the organisatrion and be able to describe context specific activity in different locations, teams and functions. You’ll have a handle on the processes and systems that the organisation is using to record coaching activity and effectiveness. Most importantly, you will have allies, role models, senior leadership sponsors and advocates, setting expectations about what the culture is going to be like round here when you’re talking about coaching.

As mentioned above, your plans for hybrid are going to be context and organisation specific. What matters more is that the principles of hybrid learning – based in science, multi channelled, live and asynchronous and measurable – and intrinsic in the design.