Covid-19 has totally transformed the world, every country to every business, to every household. Life as we know it has changed and the impact is likely to stay with us for a long time. And of course, all our learners are also going through this same change. As we try to navigate this world, we asked our learners some questions to help us understand the impact the pandemic has had on their learning.

One of the most interesting responses from the poll was that nearly 60% of respondents would have answered differently before the pandemic started. Although some of our learners did answer that they haven’t seen much of a change, it is clear that our learners have been massively affected as a result of the pandemic.

Time is a key issue

Although many of our learners mentioned being furloughed, most time restraints have been due to having to manage childcare. This has eaten into the time they would normally make for their courses.  Many learners also revealed that they would rather learn in the evenings and weekends as they are very busy during the day. Interestingly though, according to our stats, we’ve seen a decrease in use of the Avado platform during evenings and weekends. This may suggest that the people who are successfully doing their courses right now are a very different user group to the ones affected by Coronavirus.

Furlough

Many of our learners who responded to our questions said that as a result of being furloughed, they’ve had more time to complete their courses (56%). Although, they were less motivated to study in their free time. Many learners who spoke about being furloughed also spoke about their well-being as this has become an extra difficultly.

CIPD Learners have extra strains

The survey also found that our CIPD learners have a number of extra stresses as they are working on company responses to COVID-19. They’re working with their businesses to look at resource planning and taking on additional responsibilities. For those not in HR, there is still an unprecedented amount of additional stress on learners with care and home-schooling responsibilities.

Flexible Learning

The flexible nature of our courses allows people to access their learning as and when they like. A number of our key worker learners said that they are working night shifts, so the flexibility was ideal to keep them on track.

As we continue to listen to our learners, we will be looking at a number of ways to further support them. These are:

Providing well-being support

Just like us, our learners are anxious right now and have numerous additional care responsibilities. Some of the free text responses really painted a picture of the difficult responsibilities our learners are facing. It’s crucial that we support our learners in every way that we can by linking them to external resources in our communications where we can.

More self-paced learning

Flexibility is crucial for our learners in this new era. Learners want to take their experiences into their own hands and be able to make all the decisions about their course. We are going to spend some time adapting our experiences, to allow for learners to access all of the content and move through their course at the pace they wish.

More polling. More data

Everything we thought we knew about our learners and their needs have changed. The assumptions we thought we were operating on have really shifted while the world has shifted. We should be getting more data and more polling in to understand what our learners and our customers need, and almost ripping up anything that we thought before.

How have you found learning during Covid-19? Connect with us and tell us about your experiences on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.