Getting trainers on board

At the conference I attended this week in Luxembourg, participants were split into groups to try and find ways in which resistance to learning technologies from fellow learning and development professionals could be overcome. I kept notes of some of the more interesting suggestions to share with you:

1. Adopt a blended learning strategy: Well I know what they meant, but as far as I'm concerned keeping classroom trainers on board is not a reason for blended learning. A blended solution is either right for the particular learning objectives, audience characteristics and practical constraints or it is not. We lose all credibility if we design solutions to please trainers.
2. Keep it all very simple and take small steps: There's a lot of sense in this. With modern tools and online services, e-learning doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. This means there's no excuse not to get all learning and development professionals participating in some way (see below).
3. Provide easy access to sahred content: The idea here was to make sure that any content which trainers produced could be easily picked up and shared by their colleagues. This does require a little organisation, but not necessarily a full blown learning content management system.
4. Identify and develop champions: This is a familiar tactic and should help a lot. Trainers are more likely to follow the example set by a respected colleague than they are to do what they're told by specialists or managers.
5. Explain the benefits: Basic but sometimes forgotten. The very least you can do in any change management situation is to explain why the change is necessary. If you can't think of convincing arguments, don't go ahead with the change.
6. Provide training for the trainers: It's likely that your biggest obstacles are going to be attitudinal, but some trainers may lack the knowledge and skills to participate as fully as they'd like. Make sure they get the training they need and that they get plenty of opportunities to use what they learn.
7. Share successes: Keep the information flowing. When you have successes, make sure to communicate what they are. If you experience setbacks, why not share those too and ask for suggestions for ways to avoid these in future?
8. Involve everyone: This is by far the most important tactic and the one that was most highly stressed by the conference participants. As I stressed in learning is change, it is not change itself that people resist but being changed. Of course trainers are going to get stroppy if e-learning - an approach that could, after all, cost some of them their jobs - is implemented by a bunch of internal or external specialists with no involvement from them. All learning and development professionals can play some role in implementing learning technologies, whether this is designing solutions, creating content, tutoring online students, running live online events, using technology in the classroom or whatever.

Thanks to the participants at the Using e-Learning Conference organised by the Institute for Air Navigation Services for this great list.