Digital Delivery and Top Tips from ELBA’s Education Team

Written by Siân Lewis, Mentoring Works Programme Manager, ELBA/BIG Alliance

In the last six months the whole world has had to adapt its work, businesses and services, in response to the impact of the global coronavirus outbreak. For many, including the Education team at ELBA, this has meant embracing new and remote ways of working and delivering our work to our partners, volunteers and beneficiaries.

Although we have always explored technologies and remote support as part of our offer – never before has it been so central to the way we design and deliver our programmes and opportunities. It has been a steep learning curve. Initially our challenge was internal – learning how to work apart from one another and connect and communicate effectively over new platforms. Our second challenge was rapidly adapting our delivery, so that all our volunteer and student participants could continue to benefit from ongoing and uninterrupted programmes of support, at a time when robust encouragement had never been needed more.

In these intense last few months of reconceptualising everything from the ground up, writing new guidelines, protocols and best practice and trialling how to make virtual delivery as compelling and cogent as possible, the team have learnt a lot. We will take this learning into the new academic year – a year where we know we will deliver all our autumn term time activity virtually and remotely, if not throughout the academic year beyond. We will resume face-to-face delivery as soon as it is safe and logistically feasible to do so, factoring in all variables and hurdles.

The adaptation has affected the menu of opportunities we offer – it has not been possible to be face-to-face for mentoring sessions, active workshops or give tours of offices, but we are building on video and telephone based alternatives, where students can still gain the same knowledge and develop skills.

As a team we have attended webinars, workshops and collaboration calls with our company partners and organisations in our networks and we’ve taken a great deal of learning from this too. No doubt we will continue to master the world of remote and online delivery, but in the spirit of sharing and the enormous value we have found in learning from others, we wanted to set out our key approaches for effective remote education delivery at ELBA:

1. Preparation: Virtual sessions take longer to prepare and more staff to facilitate. The preparation time required is calculated as double the session duration time. There should ideally be two facilitators managing the session; which includes overseeing presentation of the slides, any additional tools used, managing waiting rooms and chat facilities and supervising break out rooms. Practicing the session before delivering it live is also essential.

2. Managing engagement: One key challenge with virtual video sessions is how to engage participants and retain energy. Sharing documents before the sessions that can be pre-read will make presentations more succinct. We have learnt that video sessions benefit from being shorter, including breaks, moving along at a punchier pace and utilising visual and interactive tools like websites, videos and icebreaker games – which all help to avoid digital fatigue. For longer running programmes we will develop as much supervised group video touch-points as possible.

3. Adapting methods and resources: We adapted our Mentoring Works programme from face-to-face to telephone mentoring; which required thought around engagement, as well as delivery method and resources. Telephone mentoring can be effective if managed well. We hit upon the simple “flex method”, as some term it, which informed the design and delivery of our resources. The method has 3 steps – find a topic, learn about it on your own and explore it together on the phone call. The team was quick to create new resources around the programme’s key content, which were regularly shared to fully support mentors – and we will take this approach into the next academic year.

4. Safeguarding: Whilst the education team already had robust policies, protocols and practices in place, safeguarding in a virtual or remote environment requires some additional thought and implementation. It is imperative for us to keep young people safe online and we have continued our policy of no unsupervised video communications between students and volunteers. Any video interaction will be supervised by Enhanced DBS cleared members of staff and adequate numbers of facilitators will be on the call in order to oversee any breakout rooms. A safeguarding best practice briefing is shared with the schools, companies, students and volunteers, ahead of the activity.

5. Reflection and evaluation: We know that we will continue to learn and improve in the coming months and upskill the team’s knowledge of tools and methods. We will be surveying our participants to see if we are delivering as effectively as we can and feed that back into our activities.

For the education team there is another significant benefit to all our new digital work. We know that online and remote connectivity is here to stay and recent statistics have been staggering; a leading video conference platform reported having over 300 million meeting participants per day in 2020 and remote work is set to increase by 77% from 2019-2022. Considering that professional online activity has skyrocketed and our young people will be entering this workforce in a matter of years, it’s important that ELBA helps to support students to get insights and skills in a digital world and be ready for future working cultures. As The Careers & Enterprise Company recently noted: