Background

Företagsuniversitetet is one of Sweden's leading companies in the business of organizing seminars and events for professionals. Every year 6 000 people walk through the doors of Företagsuniversitetet – and leave brimming with innovative thinking and updated knowledge, ready to use the minute they return to the workplace. The majority of the seminars and events has been in a physical classroom up until the beginning of 2020.

Challenge

When the pandemic hit, Företagsuniversitetet faced the same challenge as many other companies providing and organizing seminars and events. How can we switch from the physical classroom to the digital? A change that needed to happen already the same week to not cancel any further seminars.

The challenge for Företagsuniversitetet and many others is that the digital space is a relatively unknown area, which raises a lot of questions and uncertainty. Företagsuniversitetet is exceptionally good at arranging learning events in the physical space and has therefore not had a reason to explore the digital arenas.

A plan was required to make this change fast. We needed to identify what tools to use, what new processes needs to be created and how we as humans adapt to these new conditions. Even if the change is triggered by unfortunate circumstances, we can probably all state that the shift we are making now will create many new opportunities, ideas and valuable lessons for the future.

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For us and for many of our industry colleagues, spring of 2020 meant that we quickly needed to change our courses from 'live on site' to distance learning events. Since Knowly has been delivering digital complements to our courses for a couple of years now, it was natural to ask them for help to quickly transform a number of courses into distance in times of covid-19. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Knowly on this. They are knowledgeable, innovative, fast and extremely fun to work with!

Stefan Haglund, CEO, Företagsuniversitetet

The solution

Knowly's customer success team together with Företagsuniversitetet started off the transformation by defining a common objective, identifying the immediate needs and priorities. A common goal of offering every possible seminar digital instead of cancelling. It was clear that the change affects several stakeholders with different needs.

We had three stakeholder groups with different needs:

1. Teachers – Who will now give seminars in a completely new environment
2. Learners – Who will now learn in a new digital format
3. The organization - which will manage a completely new pedagogical approach with new processes.

We went straight to work and started converting their first training Sustainable Lending. By doing so, it became clear what will be required in each education that follows.

• We learned that we need to calm the concerns of teachers and provide them with support on how they can behave in the new digital classroom
• In the same way, we realized that much of this will be new to the learners and that we must provide them with the same type of support.
• For the company, the question arises: how do we now create the digital material? How do we administer our videoconferencing tool, digital breaks between sessions and communication with learners instead of conference rooms, food and hotel nights?

Activities before and after the learning event now becomes "need to have"

The first insight into the pedagogical structure is that the videoconferencing meeting cannot be as long as when we do classroom training. In order for the participants to be able to leave the training with the same knowledge, the structure must therefore be adjusted. It will no longer be "nice to have" to work with preparatory activities and subsequent work, but it will definitely be "need to have".

We identified which activities need to take place in groups and which can take place individually together. Together with the responsible teacher, we identified which different sections were of a more informative nature, which were more of a discussion nature and which were of a more reflective nature.
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• Introduction of new models and theories was now placed with a flipped classroom method - before the digital meeting happened. This type of information is perfect to consume on your own at your own pace.
• Group discussions and group assignments were placed during the digital meeting so the learners could work together just as they do in the classroom.
• Reflective exercises were placed after the digital meeting to prolong the learning journey for all learners.

Insights and Results

Tools Företagsuniversitetet uses in their transformation to the digital arena:

• Zoom as a videoconferencing tool. With Zoom, you as a teacher can both have a common room, but also divide the participants into small groups where they can discuss and work together. An advantage compared to the traditional classroom is that you as a teacher can much more easily jump around and listen into different groups' discussion.
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• For all preparatory and subsequent material, Företagsuniversitetet use the Knowly platform. It is specially developed to quickly and easily create preparatory and follow-up digital training send outs for virtual and physical classrooms. At the same time, the tool is optimized to be able to easily deliver the material to the participants via email or text message without requiring them to learn any new systems. Teachers can keep track of how their learners engage with their course material before, during and after the digital meeting. Teachers can also take advantage of ready-to-use templates with specific content neccessary to perform digital meetings in Zoom.
  

Many of us have learned more about how we can use digital tools in one week than we have in years.

Teacher at Företagsuniversitetet

Supporting Företagsuniversitetet in making this change has given us lots of learnings. There will be continued intensive work to implement the conversion of physical classroom training into digital. An important thing to highlight is that even if the change came to us quickly and due to unfortunate circumstances, we can already state that many positive things will come as a result.

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