I recently had the opportunity to use Class.com which bills itself as "The virtual classroom for learning and development". Like most trainers I have, since Covid, ran lots of sessions online, we use tools that were built for online meetings such as Zoom and Teams. Class.com turns these tools into an L&D powerhouse.
The Class.com solution is fantastic, before covering the pros, the only cons are:
1. The lack of transparent pricing. It is tricky to find a cost to ascertain value.
2. The issues of whether firms would allow this. For example, some firms I have worked with disable chat on Zoom training, there is no way they would then allow class.com
These issues certainly aren't insurmountable and the benefits certainly justify and issues. Just a selection of the WOW moments I had with the system were:
- Massively increased learner engagement. This overcomes all of the problems of standard virtual learning. Quick examples:
- Podium view for trainer with all students in separate windows and a focus for the current speaker
- Ordering delegate headshots in various ways (e.g. in order of who raised their hands, so useful!)
- Engagement scores so you can focus on who isn’t interacting and find out why
- Integrated assessments – no need to rely on terrible polls or come out to third party providers that many people don’t manage to access for tests. They are fully integrated and all results recorded
- Ability to share documents during training that each person can examine individually
- Massively improved documents and whiteboard collaboration. For example allowing everyone to collaborate on an Excel sheet we can all see is amazing
- Easily showcase learner’s work (no stopping sharing screen, then they share then reverse process, one click and they are showcasing). If people know there is a chance their work will be shown to the class they work harder
- Interactive playback with AI summary. For those who missed a session or those who want to revisit material this is great. Not just a recording playback, it also comes with and AI summary and all interactive parts (e.g. in class tests and questions) are interactive during the playback.
- Breakout rooms and 1 to 1 private discussions
- So much better. The ability to monitor all rooms at once and see engagement levels in each room is a gamechanger
- Being able to give different tasks to different breakout rooms is great for groups with different abilities but also great for games/simulations where each group is given different rules and perspectives ahead of the game starting
- The ability to jump straight into a 121 session with a delegate (whilst maintaining a view on the class) would help in so many situations
- Course admin
- LMS integration useful for many
- Easily track and record attendance, participation, results and produce reports for the client
- Share and access course info, agenda, plans etc, easily during session (for trainer and the delegates). Really useful as they often have no clue what the plan is for the day (even if you've told them three times)
All in all an amazing resource and certainly something to consider. Contact them for pricing and a demo