Short Bio

I'm an Evidence Based Trainer, speaker and author, bridging the gap between research and practice. I achieve my mission by writing books and articles, organising webinars, speaking at various different events, training trainers, designing eLearning courses, and experimenting with other trends in learning, like podcasting, micro-moments. edutainment, personalisation, and SEO driven contents.

My EPALE

I'm an EPALE Ambassador. This role was the first step towards my international influence on how training is perceived and acted upon. From small conferences held in different countries to workshops organised for the European Commission, to getting selected as one of the VISION'S 15 Key Influencers of Adult Learning in Europe. I believe EPALE had a big part to play in all this.

My Story

I think what happened when we all got on this roller coaster of live synchronous education was that new fears began to emerge. A fear that wasn't felt when we taught in our training rooms. The fear of silence, the fear of letting people do things on their own during the session.

In 2020-2021 I have organised two large online training events, both with over 150 training sessions in total. Knowing that I like to have everything under control, I decided to attend as many training sessions as possible during those events, so that I had the chance to experience the sessions and not just organise them for others.
I realised that most of the sessions, including mine, were very noisy. There was no single trainer that gave the participants a text to read. There was no self-assessment or self-reflection. There was always someone speaking.
Of course this is subjective, as later on I discovered there actually were some amazing trainers that used silence well in their training. They even used the physical spaces of participants or involved participants' friends and relatives in the session, which creates more opportunities that we were used to in our trainings before 2020.

The point is, during 2020 I realised that a lot of the limitations associated with online training were only in our heads. Online training can be just as inspiring and interactive as physical training. The problem was - we had to learn it from scratch. Thanks to this realisation, I now incorporate some of the exercises I only used to use in my eLearning back in the day, eg. designed with h5p.org - a free open source platform for creating interactive games.

I will continue to engage with online training as I think it gives a lot of opportunities for inclusion and accessibility that we simply didn’t have with face-to-face training. I am more and more confident that it can revolutionise how the world learns :)

Did you get inspired by this story? Let us know below in the comments and get the chance to win an EPALE unique gift!

5 users per month (May-November 2021) from those commenting a 2021 Community Story will be picked at random and will receive a gift. Comments must be relevant and related to the topic to be eligible.