Virtual Live Vs In Person

Les, my colleague, wrote about online vs live training the other day. I've dealt with similar aspects of this in my life. 

Back in 2010 I created a live training network of classrooms for my organizations 30 major locations. We would hire between five to twenty people a week and they all needed on-boarding training. By outfitting each branch with large screen TV's, cameras, speakers and microphones we were able to broadcast weekly training via google hangouts. It was so successful that Google actually called us to find out how we were using their system because they noticed we were using it 8 hours a day every day (we were teach an OSHA course called 40 hour HAZWOPER that requires that much work). 

We had work books to keep trainee's engaged, two way camera feeds with the live broadcasts, tests and quizzes via iphones that we distributed to each student with immediate feedback to the trainer, and we interspersed hazard analysis videos throughout the training to break it up and make the learners analyze, use and reflect. 

I say all this to mention that our plan had been to host live training events with 5-10 people and broadcast them to the branches as well. A mix of "live in-person" and "live virtual" (like you said "in-person" or "online"). No matter how we tried to organize it the hybrid broadcasts always fell apart. It was as if the trainer couldn't do both at the same time adequately and some part of the balance suffered because of if. Even if we had a trainer and a producer and limited the class sizes to less than 10, it still wasn't effectively. So, I'm with you, I'd love to know if this has been done successfully.

As an aside, the training program was really fun and effective. We won several awards and we were training to a standard that no one else in the industry could. Alas, it felt under it's own weight. We merged with another company and we went from hiring at most 20 a week to regularly hiring 20 to 50 a week. We quickly found that 20 was the most we could support with our training staff. So we had to nix it completely in 2016.