What is Hybrid Learning?

This guest post was written by the Sr. Product Manager for the Nestlé Digital Adoption Center, Greisy Flores. Since 2016, Greisy has worked with a dedicated team of learning and training professionals who develop innovative digital products for the purpose of increasing Employee Digital Dexterity.

The typical hybrid learning model includes two main components when it comes to student learning: a live classroom and a virtual training room. In my professional and personal experience, live classroom learning is no longer an option. And it’s not just because of COVID-19, even before the pandemic I was already seeing the move away from the classroom and into a more virtual learning experience.

For me, hybrid learning is about the difference between virtual classrooms and a self-paced, personalized learning experience. It is delivered in the context of the workflow and embedded in the application.

I bet everyone reading this post has seen ten versions of this paragraph over the last year. The idea that things are moving fast, needs are high, that we need to do things differently and that it needs to be contextual is nothing new. Where things start to differ is in “how” we do it differently.

The approach we take at Nestlé is to look at things from the employee’s point of view first. Then, we work with the owners of the technologies and guide them into creating course content and using applications that will improve Digital Adoption.

Digital Adoption is the technology’s ability to engage with the learner at the moment of need and to help them complete the learning activity without additional support. What I like about this approach is that it shifts the responsibility from the learner to the tech owner. It also creates an approach that can be shared across the technical stack, creating a consistent learning experience.

Creating a Hybrid Learning Experience

To create this new hybrid learning experience design model we use WalkMe, the Digital Adoption Platform and MadCap Flare. The DAP provides the users with step-by-step guided instructions, tips directly on the application and many other interactive solutions. We use Flare to create topic pages, which provide policy information, instruction, knowledge articles and process definitions. Using these two platforms together makes it easier to toggle between the target application, guided help, and knowledge articles because they are all just one click away.

In the past, employees gained new knowledge and skills throughout the course of their workday. They learned by shadowing a colleague, attending a training session or a casual exchange of ideas in a meeting or cafeteria. But people are working remotely, distance learning is still the norm and training sessions are increasingly difficult to organize, making these options less effective.

The goal of active learning and training in the workplace is increased productivity. There is no better way to gain productivity than to keep the employee in the workflow and to contextually provide them with the information and the help they need where and when they need it.

Keys to a Successful Learning Experience

I realize that I hold a different view of hybrid teaching and learning than others do. I hope that it adds to the conversation of what it means to have a great learning experience. I also want to be clear why MadCap Flare has been and continues to be a key component of our learning strategy. For sure it’s a great way for us to streamline our content delivery process. And it makes it easy for us to import personalized content or course material from different sources and digitize and translate it. But those things don’t really matter to our employees. What they love is the digital experience which is customized to their needs and the integration with the Digital Adoption Platform so that they have all they need when and where they need it.