The Future of Learning
Abstract The unexpected discomfort caused by Covid-19 pandemic and all the consequent government restrictions on travels and social distancing have pushed all the Training Organizations worldwide into an unusual challenge, being forced to support their Customers from afar. This work aims to thoroughly analyze the success of the Remote Learning methodology, highlighting key factors impacting the learning curve, and to share effective improvement ideas for this approach to deliver training focused on technical and human skills. Many companies reacted to this situation by investing largely in and increasing the adoption of digital technologies to facilitate internal and external communications and more specifically to support Remote Learning. However, despite the prompt response, many Training Organizations found themselves delivering their products through a series of trials, mistakes and lesson learned on methodology and tools. The detection of few but significant improvements increased effectiveness and improved interaction in our Remote Classes. The improvement actions concerned learning how to make the most of the available digital technologies and identifying the most effective applications for sharing documents and interacting with participants; at the same time, a great focus on the human skills approach was crucial to learn how to promote trust, motivation and interaction between our staff and Customers’ personnel. In this perspective, Operator Training Simulations (OTS) and Remote VR Training have emerged as one of the best applications to increase the attendees’ learning curve and help develop Customers’ personnel skills. Our study, however, isn't all about bright stars. The feedback told us that some Customers still prefer to take in-person training classes rather than remote ones. Sometimes this relates with biases against remote or digital activities, but it often applies where hard activities need to be performed.