We are often asked for a blended training solution for staff content writers. (Which means a majority of staff in government and education.) Well, that’s easy!
Our approach is to provide basic training online and enable you to control all other aspects of training.
Our support is available, but you can easily create your own blended learning system at very little cost.
I'm sure you realise that there are numerous ways to apply the concepts of blended learning and the flipped training room. They are useful concepts, not rigid rules. So what we describe is one of many possible blended training strategies—not the only one.
We start with the flipped training room, which turns the traditional model upside down.
Here’s the traditional model of staff training
- First, social learning: staff learn basic information in groups, in a training room, taught by a live tutor. This is a social learning situation.
- After that, solitary learning: staff are left alone to apply new knowledge to their daily work. Do-it-yourself consolidation and follow-up: this is tough.
Here's a flipped training room
The order of training styles is reversed in a flipped training room. Do-it-yourself learning comes first. And staff get social interaction and support when they need it most—when they start applying their newly acquired knowledge to their daily work.
- First, solitary learning: staff acquire basic information through independent study of online courses. Do-it-yourself learning allows everyone to get essential knowledge at their own pace, in private, at a time and place convenient to the individual. Easy, economical, and always available.
- Next, social learning: support comes from peers and managers as staff apply new knowledge to their real writing in their work environment.
Step by step: training, not straining
To create your own blended training programme, start by training staff online with Contented (easy). Then add as many or as few training supports as you please.
No need to do 50 things at once! Just do one at a time, figure what works best, and tweak.
Apply and consolidate learning with social methods and tools
- Online discussion forum, moderated or not
- Writing buddies
- Peer review
- Mentoring
- Brown-bag meetings
- Wikis and other collaborative writing tools.
Add customized resources
One at a time, build up a store of resources that reinforce writing skills.
Customized resources for staff writers can be provided by your comms team, web team or Contented consultants. Maintain resources on the intranet, so that staff have quick access to everything they need. Examples:
- Customized templates
- Customized checklists
- Customized tips
- Customised QA tools
- Customized examples of web content
- Customized online A-Z style guide.
External support for managers
For further support (especially of managers), Contented is always available. Some ways we help our clients:
- Planning roll-out
- Content strategy
- Support for managers by Skype or email
- Evaluating the success of your training programme
- Accessibility reviews.
Training staff to write well should be business as usual.
No fuss, no big deal, and no big expenses. You don’t want to be launching into a big new training project every few years.
Ideally you want an affordable, trouble-free, sustainable system that you can scale up or down as necessary. In short, you need your own customised blended training system.
The celebrated Contented online courses are the ideal starting point. And the learning goes on, step by step improving the quality of all documents and other content in your organisation.
Got a question? Big problem, little problem? We’d love to hear from you.
alice@contented.com
027 772 700
Why you don't really want us to customize a training course for you
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