Insights

Corona Contingency Planning


By Daragh O Brien
March 11, 2020
10min read
camera for live courses

Castlebridge has always been a promoter of remote working capabilites and we have tried over the years a number of approaches to help organisations find and deliver the best data management training possible for delivery in a variety of ways. Over the past few weeks we have been putting together our contingency planning for Covid19 in the event of restrictions on gatherings or other challenges in delivering training to clients either in-house or on our public courses.

We’ve got experience doing this. We’ve often had to include participants in training with clients who have staff accessing remotely, and the saga of the 2018 “Beast from the East” and my 12 days stranded in Dublin (when I was supposed to be delivering training in London, Brussels, and elsewhere in Ireland) is the stuff of legend in the office – we didn’t cancel any of our bookings during that period and facilitated clients by delivering training remotely using a variety of platforms.

The Pedagogical Challenge

It’s not as simple as talking to your class via a screen. There are pedagogical differences that need to be considered in the design and delivery of online training. And there is a difference between online “prerecorded” or “online live, instructor led” courses. This means that it can often be much harder for delivery as we can often lose the body language cues that tell us if the audience is ‘getting it’, so we have to think about how the delivery is designed and broken up and how we engage attention. It’s fun to repurpose a classroom course – and it is a rookie mistake to think that one size fits all from a delivery perspective. So, when designing courses even for classroom delivery we are always conscious of how they might need to be broken down to deliver them in different formats.

Our Public Courses

All our Public Courses that are advertised for class-room based delivery in April will now be available for online delivery. It has always been part of our strategy for our training business that we would move to an online/instructor lead delivery model for certain courses. The Covid19 risks have simply prompted us to reprioritise the roll out of this through our DataEducation.ie portal for the currently scheduled public courses slightly ahead of our original schedule (so there may still be some tweaks to be done to the learner experience).

For anyone wanting a short introductory course on different aspects of data protection, we have “pre-canned” short courses available on DataEducation.ie as well. And we will be adding additional courses over the coming short period.

Our In-house Courses

For clients who have booked us for in-house training, or for whom we have active proposals submitted, we are making these courses available in an online instructor lead mode as well. This is different to the scenario that often arises where we arrive on a client site only to see Gerry in Utah dialing in over a video link. Bear in mind, that there are pedagogical differences that need to be planned for in delivery. Therefore, we are letting clients know that we can tweak the delivery model for any course they have currently booked to ensure successful online or blended delivery.

For organisations that are looking to perhaps take advantage of a period of restricted activities to upskills staff on data protection, data governance, data strategy, or data quality, please get in touch with us and we would be delighted to put together a bespoke learning plan and course delivery.

Our Webinars

Castlebridge will continue to roll out our webinar series as well, with the next one taking place this coming Friday.


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