vILT training (virtual instructor-led training) blends traditional teaching methods with today’s digital solutions, making it an ideal fusion for flexible and effective professional training. Every part of vILT training is customizable to maximize learning potential and boost organizational success. But how do you know if vILT training will make an impact on your learners?

That’s where our webinar, Five Practical Strategies to Maximize vILT, can help you dive deeper into how vILT works and examine the ways it strengthens team learning. You’ll deepen your understanding of the meaning of vILT, learn strategies for optimizing instructor-led training, and find out how to evolve each session with continual improvement.

We aim to inspire learning leaders to create powerful, engaging, and impactful vILT experiences and lean into the wealth of options digital solutions provide. It can feel intimidating to gather an articulate understanding of vILT and how to construct an impactful experience for your learners’ needs, so allow us to share our framework.

What is vILT training?

eLearning Industry describes vILT as one of the fastest-growing approaches to online learning. It’s delivered through a virtual environment like Zoom or Microsoft Teams and simulates a traditional classroom. It’s an adaptable and flexible experience for learners to join online, regardless of location. If you’d like more background information on the basic functions of vILT and ideas for robust vILT strategies, check out our article “What Is Virtual Instructor-Led Training?”.

What is the difference between vILT and ILT?

Before we talk more about vILT and ILT, let’s clarify the difference between the two. Instructor-led training (ILT) is described as any instruction conducted by an expert in a traditional classroom environment. vILT (virtual instructor-led training) is learning led by an instructor in a virtual environment such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or via an LMS. vILT often utilizes a flipped-classroom approach where a recorded lecture can be rewound and replayed at the learners’ convenience before everyone meets as a group. vILT has been a critical learning component for companies working hybrid, remotely, or where it’s not realistic to conduct ILT sessions for all employees.

Is vILT training an ideal solution?

We recently polled our audience of learning professionals and assessed that vILT is a foundational piece of the workforce ecosystem and cannot afford to be treated as an afterthought.

Consider the following statistics:

• 84 percent of our audience plans to continue using a hybrid work model
• 85 percent of our audience plans to use vILT via digital-meeting spaces such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams
• 63 percent of our audience intends to use vILT as a learning delivery tool moving forward

Before incorporating vILT training into your organization, it’s crucial to first take a moment to familiarize yourself with the problem you’re trying to solve before developing a learning solution. Check out our vILT guide as a quick reference to discover if virtual instructor-led training is right for your team and read through a quick overview of our five strategies. A word of caution: if your main goal is to deliver simplified information or introduce a new concept, we suggest options outside of vILT training such as eLearning, reading assignments, videos, or other forms of content delivery. (Pssst! Do you create eLearning Articulate Rise? Then don’t miss Mighty, our Chrome extension that allows learning creators to do more in Rise via new features and functionality!)

By building customized vILT education into your learners’ worlds, understanding goes beyond content delivery and achieves proper application—the way learners use new information to address challenges in their daily workflow.

Here’s another valuable visual aid to help you decide which approach is best for your learners: the Learning Ecology Matrix. vILT is a great fit for activities that go deeper than content delivery and require guided navigation. This matrix, in conjunction with our Five Practical Strategies to Maximize vILT webinar, encourages learning leaders to sift through learning-delivery options, such as vILT training, and select the right approach for your objective. Think of these two references as tools in your toolkit to push learning initiatives further and create the best training experience possible.

Tell, Show, Do, Review: How does it work?

Tell, Show, Do, Review is a method that incorporates a variety of modalities to create effective, engaging learning experiences that mirror the way learners learn. As a learning professional, this structure can be a helpful blueprint as you design your experiences. Here’s how it works:

• Tell learners what they need to do
• Show what the concept looks like in practice
• Ask team members to apply skills, and find out if they can do it successfully for themselves
• Review with activities focused on application

In a traditional classroom, learners show up, and the instructor lectures for some time while learners take notes and review later. This leaves gaps in the learning process where learning time is carved out to ensure learners can apply new knowledge directly and use it to solve problems in their daily lives. vILT training thrives in the Do-and-Review portions of this framework. When considering a flipped-classroom approach, leaders maximize educational potential and provide learners with a chance to put lecture information in gear, applying it where they see fit.

When designing vILT, incorporating small-group work gives learners the space to explore how the material impacts their roles, speak openly with peers and training leaders about daily challenges, and gather more ideas on identifying and solving problems. The most effective virtual instructor-led training also incorporates a live Q&A session to deepen understanding and bridge confusion with real-time clarification.

Learning leaders greatly benefit from this portion of the vILT session, too. Make note of where learners lack clear understanding and where learning gaps exist so that you can reassess and tweak future vILT sessions. If no two vILT sessions are alike, that demonstrates that learning leaders and learners are evolving together.

Coaching is another option that falls into the “Do” and “Review” categories of learning. Bringing in other training experts decreases your learner-to-learning-leader ratio and takes the pressure off you to do it all yourself. But coaching isn’t just for learners—by bringing in coaches to help facilitate vILT, you’ll have the opportunity to hear different viewpoints from an outside expert and get feedback to improve future vILT sessions.

In a changing learning landscape, ambitious learning leaders should continually adopt new approaches, but our Learning Principles remain the same:

• Learning should create change
• Learning is a process
• Learning should meet people where they are
• Learning works best when beautifully designed

Learning is much more than conveying subject matter: it’s about understanding people and how they learn.

There’s still more to learn about vILT training

Join us to explore how to avoid the trap of simply replicating in-person learning virtually and lean into the potential that digital solutions provide instead. Our on-demand webinar is a masterclass in all things vILT. You can access the full five strategies for free, including real examples of effective vILT to inspire your approach. Here’s an overview of what’s covered in the webinar:

• The changing vILT landscape and the state of vILT in organizations today
• How to match the right tool to the job and assess whether to use vILT
• Five practical strategies to maximize the vILT format
• Examples of vILT to get your wheels turning

You’ll also receive our free download, Quick Reference: A Checklist to Maximize vILT.