Online Learning: 5 areas nonprofits should consider
Are you involved in the nonprofit sector and looking for new ways to leverage online learning programs and resources in your work? There are many ways to incorporate learning strategies, design, and development to benefit your nonprofit's mandate. Let’s explore some of these opportunities together.
Nonprofit organizations can develop online education experiences and resources that are in-line with thier values, their strategic goals and their community’s needs. One way of doing this is by offering virtual learning. Virtual learning has so many benefits for nonprofits: supporting mandates to empower communities and deepen impact, diversifying engagement strategies and funding sources through earned income. In fact, many charities in Canada have an earned income from tuition and training materials and program fees (Imagine Canada). For more information on ways to address nonprofit resilience, read our recent blog on stakeholder education and nonprofit financial resilience. Nonprofits can make use of an array of digital learning strategies to strengthen their resource libraries and rethink the way they package resources to add value to their approach in achieving their mission.
Opportunities for nonprofits to leverage learning for growth and impact are increasing massively this year. Whether your mandate is to inform, train, upskill, or reskill developing learning and knowledge resources can be an effective part of your strategy. And whether your organization is looking to grow and improve your educational impact or get it started, this blog will feature 5 key learning development areas to consider.
1. Microlearning
As online learning can take on a variety of formats, it is sometimes difficult to decide which approach might work best for your nonprofit. To help relieve some of this uncertainty, Pure & Applied has been working on developing a framework for Microlearning – a fast-growing approach to online learning. Quick to develop and implement, accessible and a driver for on-the-job support, Microlearning is made up of micro-lessons – 5-minute lessons designed to answer one specific question at a time.
How can learners benefit from such condensed snippets of information? The microlearning approach is favoured over traditional online and blended learning solutions because it is a highly agile learning tool that is quick to adapt content to address emerging needs and broaden the engagement of communities in learning. The best situations to introduce microlearning are:
Brief and immediate learning (e.g. level-setting groups before a bigger training event, product onboarding, staff onboarding)
Sustainable and long-term learning (e.g. promoting organizational culture changes such as Equity, Diversity, Inclusions)
On-going practice (e.g. to support learners in transferring their learning from an online course to the workplace)
Quick and effective reference to job-related FAQs (e.g. readily available information around an organization’s policies, protocols, workflows, and tools)
As a part of knowledge mobilization campaigns (e.g. microlearning does not require a log in, is great for mobile distribution, is very easy to navigate, and due to it’s 5-min interactive user experience it can be more effective than video for learning.
Learn more about the application of this responsive e-learning option from our recent blog on the microlearning approach.
An example of a microlearning program is DiversifySTEM. Developed by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) with funding from WAGE, this microlearning app is designed to promote diversity and inclusion among professionals working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics roles. This particular program also enabled OSPE to leverage partnerships by inviting several different experts and organizations to create different micro-lessons within their program. This is feasible to execute in large part due to the technical simplicity of microlearning development.
If you want to try your hand at developing a microlearning lesson for yourself, check out EdApp.
2. Cohort-based blended learning
Cohort-based blended learning is another opportunity for digital learning development in the nonprofit sector. A cohort-based blended learning program will combine an e-learning experience, where readings, videos, and exercises are conducted independently and synchronous or live group sessions are shared periodically to support a social learning experience. This is an approach Pure & Applied used in developing a Digital Work-Integrated-Learning course with the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC), enabling university students to learn the content on their own before the class where they would have the opportunity to engage live with an expert. Cohort-based blended learning is an approach commonly used by universities, certification programs, innovation programs – anytime connection with others, peers or experts, is essential to the program objectives. It is important not to overlook the potential that this approach has for creating connections, allowing people to gain value from learning from one another in a virtual environment.
By integrating strategic touchpoints for people to learn and collaborate with each other on a specific subject at the same time, we can provide a richer learning experience over a longer period (sometimes even over the course of a few weeks or months). Cohort-based blended learning offers a group atmosphere while also having the flexibility of independent preparation and the opportunity to bring learners together from all over the world. The group dynamic enables motivation as learners strive to meet the engagement level of the collective cohort, creating a sense of community and benefitting learners by increasing their success rates, interaction and accountability (Forbes).
3. Virtual festivals
A third area of focus for nonprofits in the realm of online learning includes the opportunity to use live online learning events that span over a week or two. This approach provides people with options, opportunities to connect, and enough time to begin to build trust and relationships as a foundation for continuous learning beyond the event.
A successful example of this is our recent collaboration with Concordia University in organizing an interactive multi-day event for the Concordia Education community. In response to a year of reactive online teaching brought on by the effects of the pandemic, we partnered with Concordia Education Department’s two resources centres ECEE and TESL to address a gap in their teacher-curriculum – gaps related to online and blended teaching. We offered their communities two-weeks of training and connecting through a virtual conference called Tackling Online and Blended Teaching: A Virtual Festival.
Our approach was to guide the Concordia team through a process to ensure that their vision and their knowledge informed our decisions. The result was a collaborative learning design process that aligned the event’s planning, marketing and execution. Pure & Applied sourced speakers from the local community and its international network of education experts to bring the greatest value to the learners.
4. Interactive toolkits
Another way to offer your communities digital and online learning opportunities is to develop interactive toolkits. Toolkits are known to be commonly used by nonprofits, as these learning resource packages function as powerful instruments for educating and enabling their communities. By implementing best practices from the science of learning into toolkits by incorporating interactive components such as quizzes, activities, and prompts we can promote greater reflection and enable action.
In our work with the Women of Ontario Social Enterprise Network (WOSEN), we guided the network through learning design and toolkit development to create a program facilitator guide and workbook. This guide and workbook were designed to meet a specific need that the group had – enabling their program facilitators to enact their guiding principles in tangible ways. Their guiding principles included: Inclusive, Accessible, Anti-Oppressive, Decolonized, Systems-Informed, and Human-Centered. These concepts were translated into practices for facilitators to perform before, during and after their sessions. The workbook allowed the facilitators to track their progress, learnings, and share knowledge amongst each other. At the end of the program, this living resource will have both empowered the facilitators individually and as a collective aiming to report on their impact.
5. Learning evaluations
Lastly, annual evaluations are a beneficial approach for improvement and impact reporting on educational initiatives, programs, and resources. If your goal is to build sustainable, responsive, relevant solutions, then consider engaging in ongoing improvement efforts.
It is vital to continuously assess and update your learning offerings as multiple significant variables to your program’s success might evolve, including aspects of:
The learner – their needs, expectations, contexts, available resources.
Learning science – online learning pedagogies, best practices or production quality standards.
Your organization – mandates, goals, strategies and audiences.
To make the most of an evaluation, we turn recommendations for improvement into roadmaps for short-term and medium-term changes. Read about our elearning evaluation practice and services to find out more.
A successful case example includes our microlearning program evaluation for the DiversifySTEM app in collaboration with the Ontario Society of Engineering Professionals. Upon reviewing engagement metrics and user feedback, the team was interested in exploring opportunities for product improvement and for revenue-generation for the non-profit. This evaluation led to additional projects that would allow the DiversifySTEM team to operationalize our recommendations within their processes and approaches to benefit their team and the learning experience they provide to members.
We hope that these 5 areas of online learning for nonprofits helped shed some light on opportunities and approaches you can incorporate in your education strategy. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you grow or develop your nonprofit stakeholder education strategy, book an exploratory call with us.
