The science of expertise: how to help professionals peak with your blended learning design

I am hooked by the Wordblitz game app - making words. I play it 2-3 times per day. I can see if I'm getting better by the scores I gain on the daily challenge. When I started playing I was simply making words. Then I suddenly discovered the 2x and 3x values and tried to make words with the higher valued letters first. This improved my score enormously. Later I discovered that you can see the complete list of possible words. Going through the list made me aware of what is possible and I shifted to larger words.  Can anybody get better at Wordblitz? I think so! 

How do you make people experts and ensure they will peak? How can you make a good blended design so that people become top of the bill in their area of expertise? I read  Peak by Anders Ericsson en Robert Pool. 

It is a fantastic book which gave me many new ideas and insights. I knew the word 'deliberate practice' but now I understand it much better. The authors have done a lot of research on top athletes, people who play the violin and experts who have reached the top of their field. They call it "the science of expertise". How does one become an expert? This provides a lot of insight into the elements of a strongly blended trajectory when the goal is to let your participants excel. When you want to bring their craftsmanship to a high level. 

A few of my eye-openers

Not talent but practice will take you far

Talent is over-rated. Research among violin players shows this very clearly. We think the top violinists are all naturals. Born with a violin in their hand. However, a survey of musicians shows something completely different! Intermediate level violin players under the age of 18 have practiced for 3420 hours. But the more interesting finding: the better violin players 5301 hours and the best 7410 hours! This shows that practice is much more important than innate talent. I should have continued with mandolin lessons :). However, just doing doesn't make you better at your profession.

Purposeful practice: consciously doing more difficult things

I like to learn in practise - the reason why I never sign up for training or courses. I was convinced that practice makes perfect. An experienced driver is better than a starter and a doctor who has been practising for 20 years is better than a youngster. But that's not true. By practising, you do reach the level of 'average performance' and develop routines. However, after this level you don't automatically get better by doing. A doctor who has been in the profession for 20 years can perform worse than a doctor with 5 years of experience. If you do want to get better, you need deliberate practice and purposeful practice: conscious and purposeful practice. 

In one of the studies, a student had to remember more and more numbers. If it goes well, he gets longer strings of numbers to remember. If he makes a mistake, he gets fewer numbers. The core of this is that you gradually stretch what someone is already able to do. In learning this is called scaffolding. 

What I found super interesting is that the student sometimes encountered a barrier and thought he was at the max of the total numbers he could recall. But then he found a new way to apply a logic to the numbers and he could continue, yet remember more numbers. Peak explains “you develop new mental models” - new ways of looking. This is I think a clue to higher performance- higher performance comes with new mental models. 

Learn from the best and define good performance

With Wordblitz and memorizing a high amount of numbers it is easy to measure a performance. With leadership, for example, this is much more difficult. What is a top performance? In deliberate practice you know what a good standard is and you work towards it. The standard is set by the top performers in the field. It then helps to have a trainer or coach who knows the standard and can help you. How do you achieve this in a field where top performance is less visible? You can find out who the experts are by asking people. You may approach the experts and interview them. Have them think out loud while they work.  You can even copy experts to understand them. I have once painted a painting by Marlene Dumas and have indeed learned quite a lot from it in terms of color choice.

You need feedback while practicing. Are you doing well? When are you on a plateau? It helps if you have a coach who can observe you and give you feedback.

How do you translate this into a good blended design?

Important tips from Peak are:

1. Find the experts and set the standard
2. Make sure people practice consciously (purposeful and deliberate practice)
3. Ensure they get feedback on their performance
4. Help develop mental representations

What the latter looks like is illustrated by an example of a chemistry lesson at a school. In the past, facts were mainly taught by telling the students. Now students get questions and tasks. When answering, they have to think out loud and mistakes were corrected, sometimes by student assistants, sometimes by the teacher. The main advantage is that they are immediately corrected in thinking errors. 

Find the experts

Technology offers new possibilities to invite experts.

• You can do a lot with video and audio. Think of the success of the YouTube teachers. Not only students can learn from this, but other teachers could also copy it. Ask for the experts in their field. Don't make the usual talking head video, but let the expert respond to 3 practical situations. How do you handle this? In developing the mission safety module for defense I asked what commanders do who do well. We re-enacted 3 situations in an audio conversation. 
• Working Outloud is an interesting approach. Can you invite people to think out loud? I remember the video of a teacher who had won a prize. Other teachers really enjoyed seeing how they approach it in class
• Organize (online) masterclasses. Focus on a case or participant.

Make sure people practice consciously (purposeful and deliberate practice)

• The advantage of a blended trajectory is that the total time is often longer than a live trajectory and you can therefore build in much more practice. A new idea to include purposeful practice is that you can form groups of people that want to practice a certain skill. Can you give them a standard?
• With collaborative learning in projects, you can pay more attention to what people want to practice. In the course, participants do this during the facilitation assignment. Some groups manage to do this better than others by organizing the assignment in such a way that everyone can practice.
• You can also let people practice online (against the myth). Eg recording a video via Traintool or Flipgrid reacting to a difficult situation. Or think of virtual reality.

Feedback 

• Can you organize that participants receive individual feedback online? Deploy coaches? In our series of online courses for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the feedback from a civil servant was indeed very useful. However, the coaches always said it is very time consuming (though fun). Can you also work with a standard answer made by the experts?
• You can also use peer assists for feedback. It is even more important to develop a standard. In our course participants make a blended design and receive peer feedback and from us as supervisors/ experts.

Help develop 'mental representations' 

I find this the most difficult one to translate into blended learning design. I think it's about teaching fewer tricks, but helping to think for yourself. Can you help me with this one? 

• Instead of organizing a Microsoft Teams course, invite a colleague who is handy to explain how he / she learns works with Teams.
• You can also think of visualizations, let people draw how they approach it. This can be done on paper but also online using Miro of Mural 

Tool of the month: game-based learning with Seppo.io

About 5 years ago I was brainstorming with a group of colleagues to design a workshop. Someone shouted: a traffic jam workshop!. I didn't have a clue what that was, but immediately had a vision of a workshop in the train to avoid the traffic jam. It has always stayed in my mind as something I would like to organize one day. A traffic jam workshop with a start in the train. But yes, it is difficult to organize this because there are always people who still want to get in the car.

Last year I found myself again in a brainstorm, but this time to organize the celebration of the 10th anniversary of Ennuonline. The traffic jam idea was tweaked. Not starting on the train but in groups at a different location and then have them walk via assignments to the place of the celebration. Seppo.io turned out to be perfect for this purpose.

How does Seppo work?

"Teach with a game. In a fun and easy way." That is the motto of Sepp.io. You can create a treasure hunt by adding assignments at locations on the map. You can create different types of assignments:

• A creative assignment in which participants share a photo, video, text or a spoken message
• A multiple choice question
• Enter a word in a phrase or an exercise where you have to match elements

The latter is more suitable for school assignments, so we mainly used the creative assignments. One of the assignments was for example: "convince the director of this building of the usefulness of technology in learning". Or: "exchange the weirdest response by a participants to the idea of online learning". Below you can see it was a day with a lot of wind: Beaufort 7.

What makes Seppo so great is that is it really easy to create assignments. When the groups start to walk you can see them walking online and monitor their progress live. You can set the assignments so that it opens when the group is within 50 meters of the place. This forces the groups to walk everywhere to be able to do the assignments. What is also fun is that you can see the groups walking. We first saw a small group go in the wrong direction. Tip: walk the route yourself at least once to test the instructions and place of the markers on the map and remove errors.

Seppo for learning

In this case, our goal was an energetic start and participants getting to know each other in small groups. Both were achieved! The tool is certainly also suitable for other purposes. Suppose you start a scavenger hunt and then have a face-to-face session. During the hunt you can invite participants to exchange on a topic and share the results during the search, as in the example of convincing the director. You can aggregate and show this afterwards and further analyze it. Which arguments will convince the most and why? After this you could also do a role play in which people practice again. The value of Seppo is in the stimulation of creativity and spontaneity. Do you also see other applications? It's nice if you share it in the comments because I definitely want to do more with Seppo.

Free or paid?

We used the paid version of Seppo.io. You can also use it for free, but in that case you cannot use certain functions such as ask the groups to share photos and videos. An alternative to Seppo is Goosechase. You can use this for free up to 3 teams.

Using personas in design of online and blended learning

Why would you work with personas when designing online or blended learning? In this blog I will share my enthusiasm about working with personas. Working with personas is not only useful for marketing professionals but also useful in a design process for learning trajectories.

Abdel lives in the capital of Mali, studies journalism and is eager to learn. He has internet access via the university network on his Huawei smartphone. He would like to learn how he can get in touch with other students in other cities in West Africa and as a journalist he would like to share developments from Mali with the rest of the world.

Hawa lives in the countryside of Mali and buys cards to access to the internet on her mobile, so she has an internet access roughly three times a week. She would like to learn how she can make short videos about her life for the NGO she works with. They have asked her to record and share how she lives and works. 

Abdel and Hawa do not really exist but are personas we have created and discussed during the design of an online citizen journalism course for people in Mali. The names Abdel and Hawa often come back: if Hawa only logs in 3 times a week, shouldn't we allow a full week for the photo assignment instead of 3 days? It also leads to the discussion whether we can actually design one course for Abdel and Hawa. In this way we come to the solution of weekly bonus assignments because Abdel might drop out if the course is not interesting enough. Abdel and Hawa prove their usefulness in this design process because the use of these two personas allow us to get into the skin of our target group. We can continuously test the design against "real personas".

Aren't personas rather used for marketing purposes?

Working with personas has its background in marketing and design thinking. A persona is a very detailed description of a user of a product or service. Marketers use it to develop products and to think about marketing a product. The dutch Albert Heijn was critized by the UN because of their personas. The customer profiles would lead to stereotypical images of customer. That is the first pitfall of working with personas. It can lead to a stereotyping of the practice. If you have that feeling, it may be good to talk more/again with the target group.

How to develop personas?

It is best to developing the personas in an interactive session with a design group consisting of various stakeholders, often content experts and other actors. A first step is to discuss the most important (sub) target groups. Then you divide the target groups among your design group. Ask your design group to crawl under the skin of a participant. In small groups you ask them to make a persona by going through the following steps:

• Make a drawing of a person
• Give a name
• Add a global description of his / her life and work
• How does he / she use the internet? via which devices?
• Why does he / she participate in the course, training or community?
• What does he / she want to learn?
• What is he / she allergic to?

After this invite the groups to present their persona in the I-form (I am Hawa and I live in Sarafere) so that people can really empathize. I have experienced that some people will make a caricature of the persona, especially if they have a difficult relationship with the group the persona represents. Try to ask for positive aspects. In fact, this exercise also gives you a sense of whether the design group has sufficient knowledge of the target group. Ofcourse, you may adjust these questions yourself or use an empathy-map.

An interesting tool to start personas may be Thispersondoesnotexist. The site will give you a random photo. Similarly uinames will provide you with fake names. You may select a country and then by clicking on the spacebar you get a fake name, that's how I get Camiel de Ruyter born in 1989. I have not tried this yet, but it might stimulate creativity.

Why I believe in the power of personas

The main design challenge is to make sure your design suits the needs and practices of the participants. Content experts in particular often think about what is important for everyone to know rather than what the participants need. At the same time, the content experts often know the target group very well. Of course you can also invite the audience or do interviews, but you may use personas if you think the subject matter experts and others know the participants quite well.

I have very positive experiences with working with personas. Making personas is ideal to get the knowledge of the design group about their colleagues or the target group on the table. Often this knowledge is available in the design group. By working with personas the group develops empathy and gets a lively image of the target group. You force your design group to get into the skin of the future participants. Personas are fictional characters and not persons that make it much more neutral to speak about them.

For the best effect, you should regularly look through the eyes of the personas during the design. With Hawa and Abdel, that worked out well, in other cases you sometimes forget to use the personas lateron during the design process. I do not really know how that is. Maybe too many personas? Or do you still start thinking from the content side and is that a pitfall?

Designing jointly with the target group versus working with personas

An alternative to working with personas is inviting the target group to participate in your design process. This is not always possible, as in the case of Hawa and Abdel. If you invite representatives of the target group in the design process, it is important that they can think along from a broader perspective than their own interests. A persona can be a good alternative because you talk about fictitious case and this gives space to play with the design. When 'real' participants say something, it can not be ignored but it may not be representative for the whole group of participants.

Interested in working with personas? Read also:

• Michelle Ockers: Personas as an integral part of how I work
• Justin Ferriman maakt al een onderscheid in 10 typen lerenden bij e-learning

My session about blended learning in Milan

I walked with three colleagues in Milan. We had one day in Milan before the Hofstede Insights conference in which I had to discuss a number of myths about blended learning. If you only have one day in Milan, you obviously want to see the cathedral. I was afraid that we had the wrong exit from the metro, not the exit where "duomo" was written. However, we came out of the metro and Bam! there was the cathedral of Milan. Really super impressive. The cathedral is so big that every exit from the metro leads to it, you can't avoid it ... It's not every day that I get an invitation to do a session about blended learning abroad. Hence, when I received this invitation for Milan I therefore wanted to add a day of tourism. And it worked! I can definitely recommend Milan. The cathedral, but also castello Sforzesco is really special. 

Getting started with debunking

The next day the real work with the Hofstede Insights consultants group started at 10.00. The group does not have much blended learning experience yet. They advise on intercultural communication a very international group, working in many different countries so there is a lot of potential to work blended.

My rationale for the session was as follows: I had heard that many of them were still hesitant about working online and blended. That is why I wanted to unearth myths and misconceptions. Furthermore, I had sent out a message asking for real client questions so that they could work on their own cases. I started the session with the blended learning Bingo to find out the expertise in the group (always more than the group thinks!), then the presentation and discussion about the myths. Then they group worked in subgroups to create a blended design for their own chosen customer request, which they had to pitch to the client. This allowed them to practice immediately with presenting a blended design. Finally there was room to discuss tools and technology.

Here's my presentation. NB. it seems like the insertion of slideshare presentations does not work as well. Here is ook de my presentation about online and blended learning   

Did I succeed in debunking myths about blended learning?

Maybe it is not so much myths, as hindering convictions and ideas. I started to shake some ideas and convinced at least a few people (I hope!). The session certainly made people enthusiastic about experimenting with blended learning. A myth that has definitely been shaken is "you need face-to-face for emotional connection". We talked about online dating online and falling in love online. If this is possible: why should you not be able to involve people at an emotional level online as a trainer?

The idea that online learning is individual and boring was also turned upside down. Many saw online as optimal for transferring information before this session (myth 1). Learning in your own time is definitely an advantage, but this can also be social and interactive. A personal approach online helps with this. Another new (useful) insight to design blended interventions was that it gives you the tools to better support and space the learning process. Do not overload them with an intercultural dose for three days, but start work together over a period of two months. It supports spaced repetition help the process of applying what you have learned. I am glad that I have opted for this focus on conceptions and ideas about blended learning, combined with the practical exercise. The tools and the experimentation phase will come after this.

The skillset of a blended trainer or facilitator: technology is overrated

This week I co-organized the #Trainingtrends2018 session in Utrecht (the Netherlands) with some 90 participants. It was fun. Amazing that we are already working on blended designs for 10 years and for some this a really new area. I think the change is relatively slow because it is shift in mindset.

The current mindset

Which of the following arguments for not investing in blended training do you recognize?

• For learning, intimacy is needed which you can only achieve face-to-face
• I feel completely energized when I am standing in front of a group
• I am quite technophobe/ I have little interest in working with technology

Why would you invest in blended training?

Blended training and coaching is becoming the norm. This means that clients are increasingly asking for it. The problem with standalone training days is often the transfer to practice. Karin de Galan describes a nice research example in which a blended trajectory provides better practical results. Students learn osteopathy and practice the treatment of a shoulder complaint in the classroom. However, they do not feel equipped to apply these skills in practice. When the design is blended and the students receive two more online assignments with feedback, they have more self-confidence to apply what they learned.

Clive Shepherd heeft een mooi voorbeeld van een blended onboarding programma. Who has not experienced an introductory program which consist of your first day. You have a program of briefings by all departments which pour a lot of information on you. In this blended onboarding case Nicole is joining a new organization. She starts online, hence she is already well prepared when she enters the organization and conversations with colleagues are more interesting and relevant. She has mentors during the first six months. That way she can get up to speed. 

Another example which I experienced myself: I recently received an explanation from a barista how we could make delicious cappuccino. Unfortunately, I did not volunteer to do it and I have forgotten about it. If I would have some videos available about preparing the milk I would watch them right before preparing the cappuccino.

A blended program has more contact moments than face-to-face training sessions. This implies that your participants are more likely to engage with the topic (spaced practice). I am hence convinced a good blended program can therefore achieve more effect. But .... of course there are also bad blended programs!

We underestimate the required skills 

In order to design a strong blended program, you need new skills. On the one hand, this is sometimes underestimated. For example, a trainer starts working with a online platform from the idea that it can not be that difficult. After all, you also taught yourself how to LinkedIn isn't it? On the other hand, there are trainers who fear the technology part, get paralyzed and do not venture into blended learning. They think: "this is not for me". I believe the needed technology skills are overrated, but the other skills underestimated. 

The five most underrated skills of blended trainers 

1. Being able to ask participants questions about experience with and interest in online tools. This is necessary to decide the toolset, the learning curve of participants in using these tools and support for onboarding participants online. Without this you risk the empty online platform and subsequently everybody saying: "it doesn't work, we need to get together".
2. Being able to design a strong blend instead of a one-off event. This requires experience with online and blended trajectory. Spacing is new, online activities. Think from the participant perspective which combination of online and face-to-face learning activities will be powerful.
3. Choosing the right online learning activities. It is my experience working with trainers and facilitators that they are great at this once they realize that you can also translate face-to-face training methods to online. I never understood why this is not logical for everyone. 
4. Online facilitation. Here, too, trainers already have a lot to offer. However, there are new dimensions to learn: online you have to ensure that people find their way online. You must also be present in a different way. More often and shorter. Sometimes you need to be more directive.
5. Last but not least: being able to choose a toolset from different platforms and online toolset. This is often a whole new area for trainers and coaches. It helps to realize that a good blended design can work in a variety of platforms. 

(image throug wikipedia)

What you see is that the latter skill, the technology, is overrated (and feared). However, the other four are equally important or even more important. The blended trainer is actually an amphibian. He / she can work on land (face-to-face) and in water (online).

Besides skills you have to believe in it

More important than skills is perhaps the mindset. You have to be convinced of the added value and the power of a well-blended design. Once you experience how you can have a huge effect on supporting the learning process of your participants you will definitely start to enjoy it.

Lessons learnt from the design of a blended learning trajectory

Over the past year I have worked with Proteion, a health organization in the south of the Netherlands. They have 3500 employees and a large part of their work is care for people with dementia. What made it so much fun to work with Proteion is that people occasionally started talking in the Limburg dialect. I could understand it reasonably it and always gave me a feeling of being abroad, maybe even the feeling of my work in Latin America and Africa :). Moreover, there was a strong vision to learn through a potent mix of learning methods to facilitate workplace. Learning with direct influence on practice. It was really about something important that we wanted to influence: better care for people with dementia. My first question was whether the people working there didn't already know and learn enough about the best care, but the thing is that when they were students, dementia wasn't as important as it is today. The second thing is that when they work in shifts, there is little opportunity to learn from each other.

Last year we had a number of working sessions, including a design workshop with all key stakeholders. After this the team continued using Scrum method to work on developing materials and assignments. The blended course is for (new) employees and consists of online modules, working together with a buddy/buddies using whatsapp, and optional face-to-face workshops based on their own learning needs. It concludes by discussing the analyse of a client case with the team leader. The course is ready and I am struck by how much work it has been to develop, and how bumpy the ride within the organization. Because it takes so much time, to develop I ask wonder sometimes if it is worth it, and whether it had not been faster to organize a face-to-face training ...

In February, just before the carnival erupted in Limburg, I was at Proteion to discuss the final design and point to put the dots on the i. I asked the location manager what he thought about the design and he said wholeheartely: "I wish we had this 10 years ago!" He was really very happy. This reassured me that it is worthwhile. The advantage is that even though the pilot start at two kocations, eventually there 2000 to 2500 people can participate. A first blended design is really a steep learning curve whereby it takes a disproportionately long time. I am curious about the results of the first pilot. A concrete result should be that the care improves and thus the number of incidents with clients and complaints from carers goes down. One challenge is the fact that employees are not paid for extra hours they invest in learning.

Lessons in developing a first blended course
I made a spark video for the start of the trajectory, however it is in Dutch.

• Blended learning aimed at enhancing workplace learning really requires different roles than face-to-face workshops. We were luckily to have someone in L&D with heart for the technique who has done quite a job in understanding the potential of the learning platform and talking to and negotiating with the vendor. I am not sure any L&D could have done this. The psychologists who normally give an expert lecture also have a different role: in the search of materials, thinking about assignments and recording a short video. Furthermore, we really need the team leaders for this project, they will evaluate the final project and issue the certificates.

• You can't simply designing a blended course, you also have to deal with organizational policies and politics. A blended course within an organization aiming to change practice is never standing on itself, especially if the subject is important (and it should be!). In this case there was overlap of the original topics of two separate initiatives which had to be worked out. There was a collaboration with another institution with apprenticeships in the same field. It takes time to properly position a blended course as one of the instruments among all other (change?) activities within the organization. In this case that was the cause that it took a year to develop the blended trajectory.

• The most difficult to organize collaborative learning online. Everyone can imagine or has seen individual e-learning modules. However, how do you organize interactive learning and how do you facilitate it? It is difficult to anticipate and imagine if you have little experience with it. Where to use collaborative learning? Which social tools to use or leave it open? How do you make a good connection between the various components? Are we going or not facilitate over time the online modules or put everything open and people to work in their own time?

• Sometimes you have to work with what you have. In this case the platform (PulseWeb). Although this platform does not offer all interaction opportunities that we would like it offers a lot of advantages. The organization has already purchased this platform, the employees are already used to log in, and you can get started right away without any additional search or costs. Disadvantages of an existing platform is often a lack of interaction and tight structure. This experience learn that it is worthwhile talking to the vendor to searching for ways to make it more interactive and personal.

Lessons from the professionals within Proteion are:

• Blended learning is really another way of designing. We have underestimated this. Following the Ennuonline course alongside the support helped us get a broader look into blended learning approaches and various tools.
• Make sure you're running fast; learning by doing, which can be supported by an expert on how to go about it, what are good examples. We have learned the most from the meetings with you there; working together on your own design; someone who asks the right questions, thinks about what steps you must take, for example, during the search for a platform, concerning attractiveness of the online course with photos, quotes, inspiring assignments.

Facilitating the transition from online to face-to-face conversations and vice versa

Photo by sparkzy

I participated in the online facilitation course by Nancy White (long ago!) when we were practising a chat session, just typing without any audio. The flow was very fast, it was Friday, there were lots of jokes and I was enjoying myself. Suddenly Nancy said - shall we move to a teleconference?  So we all dialed in to the teleconference and we didn't know how to continue. The flow was gone... We had to start afresh with our conversation and the line of jokes was gone, because in a teleconference the threshold to throw in a funny line is much higher. It was a good experience to realize that all media have their own affordances. I also realized that the conversation doesn't flow naturally when moving to a different medium.

Blended trajectories
When designing trajectories with an online and face-to-face component you hence need to facilitate these transitions. I've been doing it - sometimes succesfully - but sometimes not at all. The most succesfull transition is in our learning trajectory on social media. We start with 2 weeks online and people are then really eager to meet face-to-face! The are also eager to start online, because they are starting with a new course and are very curious. I decided to ask for some more experiences with facilitating these transitions, on Twitter (thanks Anjet van Lingen and Ben Ziegler), and in the Linkedin groups of the LOSmakers and Virtual Facilitation where I also got very useful contributions. Ben has written a blogpost about the same topic with the great term 'choreographing conversations' and talking about fluidity.

Two examples of a blended design
Nancy Settle- Murphy offered a nice example asked for help in creating a new strategic plan for a 70- person department. She opened a virtual conference space where all employees were invited to answer a few open-ended questions related to strategic opportunities, threats, etc. and to assess their workplace culture. Then summary was used to jumpstart a 1-day working session face-to-face with  the executive team to come up with 7-9 strategic focus areas. Since she wanted all members of the department to be able to propose ideas and actions for all initiatives volunteers lead subteams to brainstorm ideas and propose action plans for each initiative, this was done face-to-face as well.   Each session of 7-9 people had a scribe, who keyed the ideas generated in each session ideas into the virtual conference space. Everyone was then invited to join the online conference area to view ideas, and submit their own ideas. This was used to create detailed plans. 

Vera Hendriks of Agri-ProFocus shared how they use online before a meeting to set the agenda together, then distribute flyers during an event with the web address. After the meeting they post reports and photos online, as well as discussions. People are curious to see the pictures, hence log on and may then contribute as well to discussions. 

Nice examples of how you can blend online and face-to-face elements... and make use of the advantage of both modalities. What I like about the example is that the steps are all geared to making optimum use of time and knowledge of participating employees. In other words - you can think strategically about participation in the process.

Commitment and a sense of urgency 
The hard part of a blended process is ensuring online participation. What is key to a successful transition is that people feel committed to the process and see and feel the urgency to continue online or start online. People may attend a meeting because they are invited but may more easily ignore an invitation to contribute online. Hence it is very important that there is a clear sense of urgency and that the topic is important enough to deserve more attention. Why would the group continue online or why start online? Without this urgency it might be better not to continue online to avoid disappointment with contributions and avoid that you end up 'pulling a dead horse' (is this an English expression?).

Seduce
Equally there are ways to seduce people into participation online. A practical example is to post something of interest like photo's and people may be triggered to look at the photo's. You may also give out a price for the best contributors. And seduce by bringing your own enthousiasm.


Be clear about the ending
What is also important is that there is clarity about the online process and that it is not too-open ended; altough in communities it is often more open-ended and spontaneaous. For instance make it clear that you will collect arguments or examples for 2 weeks, then analyze the arguments and end with a poll to vote for the best arguments. Also state when the discussion will close and/or the online space will be closed down.

Some practical tips to facilitate transitions for facilitators

• Think through the overall goal and various online and face-to-face steps and how they are linked. Point out how the steps are linked to eachother. This will help people see the urgency and logic.
• When transitioning from face-to-face to online, make it attractive for people to participate online by offering a 'warm embrace' make sure the online space is attractive, be enthousiastic and be there yourself online. 
• Develop a sense for the hot topics with sufficient urgency to attract people's attention for a longer period of time. Look for lead persons to help shape the topics online. 
• When transitioning from online to face-to-face make sure you bring product or summaries from the online discussion into the face-to-face. Make that the basis for the next steps.