Gerri Knilans is president of Trade Press Services, Thousand Oaks, Calif.

• Author: Howles, Diana L.
• Position: Online learning

Learning to Learn Online

THE LIVE ONLINE LEARNING environment is a living ecosystem. It projects a feel, tone, and energy where cultural norms dictate acceptable and unacceptable behavior. These surroundings also dictate whether the space will be collaborative or competitive, welcoming or distant, conversational or rote, led with credible professionalism or fraught with technical chaos.

Environment shaping, then, includes everything a virtual trainer or online educator does to influence this ecosystem. Shaping an environment encompasses all the little and big things facilitators, as leaders of the environment, say or do not say, do or do not do, react to or do not react to. These are the established norms that lay the foundation for how the virtual training session will go and how all the interdependent parts will interact within it.

Let us look at the ways facilitators can develop their capability in environment shaping. To do so, I present the 5 Cs Pyramid to understand the learner experience, lay out the welcome mat with activities before class, lead live sessions with enthusiasm and personalization, and foster psychological safety for learners.

After 20 years of training online, I have noticed that many learners experience a progression of mental stages when they join a virtual session. Sometimes, they appear to progress fully through all of these stages in only seconds, while for others, it may be much slower. The usefulness of this pyramid is that it reminds you to be empathic toward the learner experience.

The goal is to move learners through all the stages as soon as possible without getting stuck in any one phase. Much of this movement usually remains subconscious. For example, a learner may not actively think, "Is it safe for me to say something here?" Instead, he or she might think "I don't want to look stupid" or "I don't want to embarrass myself without articulating those feelings aloud. Let's examine each of the 5 Cs more closely, from the bottom of the pyramid up.

* Cautious. This is the first stage, when learners log into a platform and internally ask themselves any number of questions reflecting early caution: "Did I click the right link?" "Is my tech working?" "Can everyone hear me and see me?" "If I click this, will I lose my chat?" Being cautious as they log into virtual training is natural because it is a new class and new space.

* Curious. After moving past caution, learners realize they can be seen and heard and are...