Learning Environments Matter: Is Online Coursework the Right Fit for Your Organization’s Advocates?
Storytelling for advocacy—as we define it—means sharing personal stories from lived experience publicly in order to advocate for some form of positive change. And at the center of the LPA Method of storytelling for advocacy is this core belief: sharing personal stories publicly is a significant act.
That’s why, when groups of new advocates are learning to turn a sometimes hard, personal chapter of their life into meaningful and effective advocacy, the environment they're learning in shapes how authentically, and how safely, they can do that work.
Actual vs. Virtual
This is true whether the environment is an actual or virtual room. A live, in-person session gives a facilitator the ability to read a room in real time—to notice when someone's getting close to something difficult or important, and adjust. An online course gives people time, privacy and the ability to revisit material at their own pace, without an audience watching them process it. Neither environment is necessarily better. They're different, and the right choice depends on the group— size, schedule, budget and specific learning goals.
We built our online, on-demand course to be genuinely robust—not a watered-down version of live training, but one with real strengths of its own: depth, accessibility and room to customize the experience to an organization's needs. But we also know it isn't the right fit for every group, every time.
A brief, honest assessment
We don’t want groups to find, three weeks into a course, that it isn’t landing the way you hoped. So we built a brief assessment tool to help you figure it out before you commit: a ten-question assessment, about three minutes long, that looks at your group's size, schedule, budget and goals—and tells you plainly whether online or live training is the better starting point.
If live training is the better call for your group, it'll say so. If it’s a toss-up, we’re here to help you choose.
