Moors has been making headway with Locus Training ever since. At one stage he felt that the interaction with trainees in the trainings needed to be more intense. Locus Training started setting up blended learning, but lacked the digital infrastructure for it. "In the beginning it was fun to get started and we did some tinkering ourselves. But it was complicated for trainees to upload assignments through our Wordpress website. If we wanted to apply blended learning seriously, we really needed something else," Moors reflects.
In his quest to professionalize blended learning, he came across a so called 'pizza workshop' in Maastricht by LearningStone, where blended learning was the main focus. The workshop immediately appealed to him: "Approachable, fast, customer-friendly," is how he recalls that meeting in Maastricht. But it was mainly the personal contact with LearningStone that convinced him.
"I didn't get a help desk employee on the line, who has a set of scenarios in front of him. I was in direct contact with people from LearningStone who know the platform well. I have personally become increasingly proficient with blended learning and have been helped by LearningStone along the way. They also looked at what was cost-effective for us", is Moors' experience.
Since Locus Training embraced blended learning, the "blended components," as Moors calls them, have increased heavily in number every year. Online questions, assignments and quizzes are all put into the online part of the training so that trainees can take them on their own time. Especially for Locus Training courses, which often deal with setting boundaries, the online options are really useful. "For example, trainees are taught about situations in which they are put on the spot by a patient and have to learn to really set their boundaries. They are shown different videos of situations and with the help of multiple choice have to indicate what be a good response would be. Because our participants can already practice online themselves with these videos, they simply make the transfer from theory to practice faster."
Five years of blended learning has helped Moors' company become more professional and a better training company. "Locus Training's mission is to support people with psychiatric problems and professionalize their counseling as much as possible. Blended learning has helped to improve the quality of our training programs."
