Challenge
Vilma Mutka, CEO, Facilitator, Leadership and Learning Coach from Mukamas Learning Design, was looking for a solution to increase engagement among 600+ participants in a kick-off event for Finland’s largest secondary vocational school.
Solution
Vilma chose Howspace as the platform to ensure the event was both inspirational and could help facilitate several different points on the agenda.
Results
There are always limited encounters in a single process. That’s why Vilma Mutka, CEO, Facilitator, Learning Design and Leadership Coach at Mukamas Learning Design, looked for a solution that would help her to enable the extension of the learning process as a whole from beginning to end.
Continuum of the process that enables learning
Working as a seasoned facilitator and a coach of learning design and leadership in a multitude of different development projects, Vilma wanted to support the transition of learning to everyday life: by not only initiating preliminary tasks for orientation and sharing knowledge in advance but also having an active dialogue and engagement throughout the longer processes.
“It’s not about tasks for the group from the coach or trainer or that the participants would return some ‘homework’ to the trainer”, Vilma says. “It’s about building a genuine dialogue among all the participants, and in building this dialogue, Howspace has pleasantly surprised.”
Customers and participants have warmly welcomed the platform. Howspace is a very natural part of the training process, with familiar features from social media platforms. “Participants have a workspace where they can safely share their thoughts and ideas, even with a topic that might be a bit sensitive. That’s something that you wouldn’t do with open groups (like on Facebook). Those groups are for different kinds of conversations”, Vilma reminds me.
Increasing engagement among 600 participants with digital facilitation
The start of this autumn was particularly lively. Vilma was a facilitator in a big kick-off event with the largest secondary vocational school in Finland. Digital participation played a big role in the day, and over 950 staff members were present at the event. With a big group of participants, it’s important to get everyone involved in some way, reflecting on and discussing the issues.
The goal was to create an inspirational day, but on the other hand, there were quite a few things on the agenda, as easily happens on these kinds of kick-off days. This was the first working day after the holidays for many of the participants, but Vilma still managed to get some preliminary discussions in Howspace. “With stimulating questions, partly playful ones, we got the group to think about how this autumn will start,” Vilma says.
The staff had a lot of important and perplexing themes in mind, involving big changes in the organization and daily work. During the day, everyone could present questions in real time to the speakers. “It worked very well, and the level of participation was very rewarding,” Vilma says.
Since every participant always brings his or her own mobile phone with them, there were around 600 registered users, all of them doing something on the platform: commenting or discussing, voting, and adding photos of the day.
