Education Information

What do we know and not know about Trade Union online learning?

Introduction

Over the past few years Trade Unions have embraced to various degrees the online delivery of training for union reps and officers. The covid pandemic accelerated the use of online delivery often in an ad hoc manner to react to the complete lack of availability of face to face training. Prior to the pandemic some organisations had pushed towards online training as a means to address declining numbers attending face to face courses (sometimes due to less facility time), a curriculum that didn’t work for ever yone, various behaviours (e.g. drinking culture on residential courses), personal pressures such as caring responsibilities, etc.), to save costs and to increase accessibility. The creation of Union Learning Fund funded IT hubs enabled some unions to use technology in the delivery of rep and officer training. Often this was either to complete e-learning modules aided by a tutor or to allow research on the internet to support face to face training. In terms of online delivery, the lines between training and providing information have become blurred with online meetings and webinars being used to impart information to wider groups of members (but this cannot really be referred to as “training”) . There are many aspects of online meetings for learning and development that have been adapted and utilised for organising purposes especially around engaging and involving members in campaigns but, again, this has been for purposes other than training. This paper is intended to start the process of reviewing what role online training can take in the training and development of union reps and officers. It concludes with a number of questions for further consideration. The use of webinars was beginning to grow with unions using a variety of platforms to disseminate information to generally large groups of members and/or activists. They were largely one way traffic with little interaction from participants other than occasional use of polls within the sessions. The TUC developed a replacement for its 10-day programme which was available online with learners completing a number of tasks on their own. Tutor support was available but there was no interaction with other learners – the course was in effect computer based training. Individual unions, GFTU and the TUC all created computer based, bite sized E learning modules that individuals completed online. Typically, these sessions were short (30 minutes or so) and the learner was prompted through various stages via an online learning portal. Pre-pandemic

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