Online Training
From Networked Advocacy
The ability to meet, share and train virtually has revolutionized the speed and effectiveness of communications within networks operating across time and place. Networks can organize strategy meetings, briefings and updates, trainings and even teambuilding events in the online space. You probably have no shortage of ideas for ways you can use the online space for your work. But do you know how to use it well?
Online trainings are faster, cheaper and more efficient than face-to-face meetings. Organizations can bring more people together, more affordably, than ever before. But there are downsides too. Many of the challenges of face-to-face trainings endure in the online space, complemented by a new set of online training considerations. It's trickier to gauge the mood of the participants and generally infuse physical energy into the crowd as you normally would.
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Some strategies and tips for running and effective virtual meeting or training:
Planning the training
- Know your motivation: purpose and audience. Make it personal.
Why do the training? What does it do? Who are the participants? What value do they get? Tailor your content to your audience. Know who will participate in advance, and prepare material that is interesting and relevant to them.
- Craft intentional and useful content
What do your participants really need to know? It’s not everything that you know – rather, training participants are looking to you to deduce the most useful, actionable content from your broader understanding of the issue. If participants need lots of background content before attending the training, then provide it prior.
How can you ensure participants are absorbing the material? What do participants need to master in order to act after the training is over? Do they need to practice the content during the training? Discuss its application in small groups? Watch you model various actions, etc.?
- Know your process
Knowing your content, people and purpose isn’t enough – you still need to develop your learning process. If you just want to hand people information do it in a paper. What’s the value of training in the online space? Think about how people can interact with you, each other and your content to learn something in a fun way.
- Use what you already know.
Many of the best practices of face-to-face trainings extend to the online space as well. All training events – whether virtual or in person – should be fun, instructive, and most importantly – actionable. But online trainings need to do these things even better, given the additional challenges of keeping people’s attention in the online space.
Remember the principles of effective trainings (virtual or otherwise): don't read from slides, do make things interactive, do use examples, don’t use lazy visuals (lots of meaningless clip art images), do introduce groups of new material followed by time for participants to process.
Logistics: during and after the training
- Time matters
The best average training time is 1 hour. Break your content into multiple sessions if necessary. Factor any time needed for set up into the training time. Don’t let participants sit there once they’ve arrived – get them engaged with the technology – complete a poll, add content to a wiki, etc.
- Map the process
Give the audience a big picture idea of where you want to take them. Recap by discussing where you’ve arrived. Encourage questions and discussion.
- Set the mood
Keep loose control over the conversation. Be prepared to reign in conversations that stray from the topic. Frame and summarize comments. Remember, participants don’t have the body language to “shut off” conversations and are dependent on facilitator to keep conversation focused.
- Plan well
If you’re using a new or tricky online training tool, arrange any necessary support to ensure all attendees are able to get on the training. Remember to take participant locations into account, and plan a call for a time and day convenient for all. The facilitator should use a headset or handheld phone (no speakerphone!), thereby transmitting his/her voice as clearly as possible. And ask participants to mute their phones if they're not speaking, to prevent unnecessary background noise.
Other tips
- Build community
- Have the participants introduce themselves at the beginning of the call. This is a critical community-building step.
- Encourage questions and interaction. Find a way to get people to speak – even if it’s just introductions. Once participants speak, they’re more likely to chime in later during the call.
- Use inflexions in your voice to add meaning and connection. Remember, you don't have visual cues as you might during a face-to-face training. Solicit opposing or correcting comments, to engage people and bring energy to the conversation.
- Pause after each key visual and solicit responses. Start this early so that people are in the habit of "owning" the conversation with the facilitator. This increases learning, satisfaction, and readiness to follow-through (you can also gauge comprehension).
- Provide lots of detail in your visual descriptions...the office space, weather…anything that helps people "lock in".
- Put your photo on the screen when you are talking.
- Ask for volunteer timekeepers, note takers, summarizers, etc.
- Wrap up
Ask for volunteer to summarize conversation, including possible next steps and take away points. Establish a “check out” process by soliciting a few words from each participant. Generally the focus should be "What did I learn or what moved me in the conversation?", "What I'm going to do?" or "What made me think in a new way."
- Survey
Close out with a follow up survey. Respond to results of the survey within 24 hours. Provide useful notes and follow up links and remind participants how they can get additional information and get to the next training.
Tools
Following are tips and suggestions for some of our favorite online training tools. By no means are these the only options out there – but these are ones we like. A general piece of advice is that while the free services are usually effective, they're not as reliable as paid services. Nevertheless, many networks effectively use the free tools regularly.
WebEx: This paid service offers the ability to host trainings for an unlimited number of participants through live, real-time sharing of uploaded material, specific applications and even the host's desktop. For example, trainers can switch between a powerpoint presentation and a live website illustrating a point being discussed. WebEx also offers a paid conference conference call service to accompany the presentation. www.webex.com
Google presentations: Google has recently launched its free 'presentations' feature, accessible through Google Documents. The service allows meeting hosts to share a powerpoint presentation with an unlimited number of participants. Layout options are somewhat limited, but functional. www.docs.google.com
Jing allows users to capture images and video and share them instantly with others online. Jing doesn't have a real-time component, but the host can record material in advance and share with others. http://www.jingproject.com/
Free Conference Call.com: Offers free and moderately reliable group conferencing.
