How can you motivate your employees with blended learning?

Improve your training results with motivational principles

Motivation is the key word in everything we do and want to maintain. In fact, motivation is essential for online learning. In order to improve your participants' training results, it is necessary to apply so-called motivational principles. These principles, which can be perfectly integrated into a blended form of e-learning, were collected and recorded by e-learning expert Curtis J. Bonk and scientific researcher Elaine Khoo.

In their book 'TEC-VARIETY', Bonk and Khoo describe 4 schools of e-learning that use the different motivational principles:

1. Behaviourists assume that you keep participants engaged through extrinsic motivation, such as rewards, assessments, guidelines, and certificates. This also includes personal follow-up steps, based on individual learning performance.

2. Cognitivists see it as the teacher's task not only to transfer knowledge, but also to help participants process that knowledge. This movement uses extrinsic motivation through testing and intrinsic motivation by learning to reflect. Factors such as autonomy, the feeling of being good at something and being part of a group of like-minded people provide further motivation.

3. Constructivists believe in motivation through positive experiences. As a lecturer, it is best to create this in a setting where participants have to solve a problem, using the knowledge they have gained.

4. Supporters of the social cultural method stimulate cooperation. Within this method, the lecturer is someone who only facilitates. Participants are responsible for what they learn, visiting each other and exchanging information. Factors such as group dynamics and recognition play a major role in candidates' motivation.

Blended learning for a broad target group

For e-learning, your candidates must have sufficient self-discipline, blended learning is also suitable for students who are less able to manage their time. As a trainer, do you have doubts about the extent to which your candidates can focus? So be sure to consider a blended form of e-learning.

By the way, you can also use blended learning tools to manage your trainers

Benefits of a blended form of training

The combination of remote training and face to face is that, as a trainer, you can provide online instructions that you then explain in class. Or at least those topics that your participants have misunderstood. The better you know the participants, the better you can take best practices into account when developing your training. To do this, Pluvo offers you the opportunity to analyze data. Here you can find the blended learning then adjust the training. If your candidates appear to mainly achieve results by working together, you can, for example, let participants explain the material to each other, possibly via a screencast. And what about self-direction? Is it necessary to do a lot of tests in the meantime, or are general assignments sufficient?

Motivation principles in practice

Based on the 4 movements above, Bonk and Khoo have formulated 10 principles for motivating participants. Together, these principles form the acronym TEC-VARIETY.

In short, the motivational principles come down to this:

• Create a safe learning environment. This includes welcome videos.
• Provide sufficient feedback. Think about feedback on content and on the learning process.
• Stimulate curiosity. Ask plenty of questions, take blurred photos at every item
• answer more visibly, formulate quiz questions, announce guest speakers you won't announce until the last minute, etc.
• Encourage collaboration. Take the initiative in organising collaborations, both online and real-time.
• Ensure relevance. Is what you've learned interesting for a larger group of people?
• Make the end result tangible. Make sure participants work towards something.

Conclusion

Motivated candidates are satisfied candidates. The preconditions for satisfied candidates are described in the book TEC-VARIETY. The use of internet technology for training should be aimed at ensuring that candidates understand, remember and be able to apply the material. By anticipating the results of data analysis, you can ultimately make candidates perform better.

Want to create your blended learning too? Try Pluvo, it's free.