Organizations worldwide are closing offices and supporting a remote workforce for the coming weeks or months. When it comes to implementing new training or introducing updated offerings, are you capable of delivering critical information to employees at scale? How will you connect with your remote employees to ensure they stay engaged, follow through with required training, and retain that knowledge?
Keeping remote employees engaged with training materials has always been a challenge, but now, companies are being forced to roll out learning programs to an entire workforce who are working from home. How confident are managers that this new knowledge is being learned and retained?
Remote Learning at Scale
Scaling workforce learning programs is costly and takes months or even years to implement with supporting technology. And now, with people being asked to work remotely with little notice, it’s important to ensure that learning programs are accessible and effective for your whole workforce immediately.
One of Qstream’s benefits is the ability to deliver learning quickly and at scale. Qstream’s SaaS-based mobile microlearning solution is easy to implement. For years, Qstream has delivered engaging microlearning challenges in just minutes a day, available on any mobile device to large, complex and highly regulated organizations around the world. Peer competition and leaderboards keep remote employees excited to complete scenario-based Q&A challenges while learning new content and reinforcing critical concepts.
Qstream collects data points from users responses to Q&A challenges and provides managers with real-time dashboards and proficiency heatmaps, measurements of training effectiveness and highlights of knowledge gaps to guide targeted coaching opportunities and future training needs. When compared to traditional learning management systems (LMS) which only show learner participation and course completion data, Qstream’s learning analytics provide valuable and targeted data and insights on specific content topics, regions and individual learner performance.
While Qstream is widely known for reinforcing material that has already been presented, co-founder, B. Price Kerfoot, MD EdM confirms that Qstream’s spaced education methodology, called “the spacing and testing effect,” is clinically proven to teach new material as well. In fact, Dr. Kerfoot references three clinical trials proving this success in a recent blog post.
In one of those randomized studies, conducted by Dr. Tim Shaw, 371 new doctors-in-training at two of Harvard’s teaching hospitals received new content on patient safety behaviors either through traditional web-based teaching modules or through a spaced microlearning program. The study demonstrated that spaced microlearning training is more effective at teaching new content than web-based teaching modules and generates observable behavior change.
In another analysis, Johnny Hamilton, Senior Design and Innovation Consultant at Providence St. Joseph Health, discovered that its training impact was not correlated to when employees were last trained. He ran a Qstream to three different groups. One group had previously been trained on the materials in an instructor-led course 4 months earlier, another took the formal course 9 months earlier, and the final group was learning the concepts for the first time.
After running a Qstream to all three groups, Providence St. Joseph Health found that all three groups had the same initial proficiency, whether or not they previously took the course. Whether it was 4 months earlier or 9 months, people forgot what they learned through traditional learning methods. This means that the learning process has to be presented and then immediately followed by an ongoing learning activity that is spaced over time to reinforce critical knowledge.
The research and customer feedback point to the fact that Qstream’s microlearning solution is a successful way to engage, present new critical knowledge, and then reinforce it so that learners in today’s distracted world can remain informed to do their job successfully. While the shift to a completely remote workforce may be temporary, implementing a cost-effective, non-disruptive, clinically proven microlearning solution will stand the test of time, even as people come back into the office in the coming months.
