Why is it sometimes so difficult to get participants engaged in a web conference?  Well, one obvious reason is that it’s a different environment for participants.  Just as facilitators need to get used to facilitating in a live virtual environment, so do participants.  We’ve all grown up learning in a traditional classroom environment where the social norms and etiquette are understood.  We know the cues to raise our hand to get the facilitator’s attention, when to jump in with a question, and other typically ways of interacting.

Even though delivering training through a web conference is not new, it’s not mainstream either, so facilitators need to be explicit about how they want participants to interact.  Facilitators need to tell participants to use the chat area, how to raise their hand virtually, how to respond to polls and other other new ways to interact in the virtual classroom.  And here’s another tip: you need to start the interaction early in a web conference – within the first few minutes.  If you engage the audience with interesting questions posed in the chat area, a poll and a fun exercise, you are off to a great start.  Alternatively, if you wait to engage the audience until you are done lecturing, then expect to turn on the engagement switch and have participants jump in and start asking questions verbally or begin typing interesting comments or questions in the chat area, you may be disappointed.

• Set the tone early in your session for a high level of audience engagement, explain to participants how to use the features of the web conference to interact, and you will likely get great results.  A few simple ways to do this:

• Greet each person in the chat area as they enter the virtual meeting room.  If participants don’t respond in the chat area, verbalize what you are doing and let them know that they can also type in the chat area now and throughout the session.

• Post a poll asking how much experience the audience has with the topic.  Comment on how many poll responses have come in and how many you are waiting for.  When everyone has responded, thank them for responding and comment on the results.

• If audio will be used, ask participants to introduce themselves and what they hope to gain from the session (size permitting).  If your session will be one-way audio, ask the question and request that participants type a response in the chat area.

• Ask participants to complete a pre-course survey.  Select a few interesting findings from the survey, share on a slide and ask people to react.  Tell them if you would like them to type in the chat area, vocalize their reactions, or both.

• Show a map of your country or the world and ask participants to use the whiteboard tools to show where they are from, or where they happen to be located on the day of your session

• These are just a few ways to encourage interaction as your session begins.  The key, of course, is to sustain the interaction by using all of the features available to you in your web conferencing tool.  Care to share an idea on how best engage the audience either at the beginning of or throughout a web conference?

I’m in Bogota, Colombia this week, observing a day long face-to-face delivery of a business writing course for English speakers to convert to a global virtual delivery.  The virtual delivery of this course will be piloted with several countries in the Middle East.

This means that the content needs to be truly global and examples and images must be meaningful across different countries.  One thing we learned in the live delivery was that a reference to a “lightning bug” wasn’t meaningful to the English speaking Latin American audience.  Also participants had never heard the word “toil” as part of an example of using short words in the famous Winston Churchill speech “I have nothing to offer you but blood, tears, toil, and sweat.”

Other changes will be with the exercises.  Throughout the face-to-face course, participants discuss key learning points with their neighbors such as word choice and sentence structure.  In the virtual classroom we plan to show writing samples and give participants the opportunity to make edits live on the screen.  We’ll also screen share examples of documents with track changes to illustrate examples – this is sometimes tricky in a face-to-face setting because it’s difficult to see, but in the virtual classroom participants will have a much better view of the edited document.

The conversion process I’m following is to:

Only three weeks until the pilot and still a lot of work to do!

I’m always excited when a new book on virtual training is published because there is so much to explore on this topic and new ideas to discover. Diana Howles’s new book, Next Level Virtual Training – Advance Your Facilitation (ATD Press 2022) is well researched and includes dozens of learning principles and theories, all presented with virtual training lens. She offers refreshing look at the topic of virtual facilitation by structuring the book’s content around eight virtual trainer capabilities:

1. Experience design
2. Environment shaping
3. Online facilitation
4. Facilitator Presence
5. Technical fluency
6. Dynamic engagement
7. Agile troubleshooting
8. Evaluating impact

I especially liked the advanced facilitation techniques she covers in Chapter 4: “Applying the Secrets of Effective Online Facilitation.” She includes great ideas on how the make virtual spaces inclusive, the importance of instructional clarity and the pausing principle.

The book concludes with an excellent chapter on “Combining Online and On-Site Learners in Live Mixed Learning.” The term live mixed learning was new to me and it’s a much more precise way to describe hybrid classrooms. Howe offers practical ideas on how to overcome technical challenges and learner experience inequities for in-person vs. virtual participants. Designing and facilitating live mixed learning are definitely advanced skills for learning professionals and she has good ideas on how to maximize benefits and mitigate risks for this format which continues to expand as hybrid workplaces become mainstream.

So if you are serious about growing your virtual training skills to the next level, add Next Level Virtual Training to your reading list.

Ask a person who attended an in-person training and most likely s/he will comment that one benefit of attending learning events is the opportunity to learn from and network with peers and trainers. Networking happens more naturally in a face-to-face setting as participants mingle during coffee breaks or after a course concludes.

In the virtual classroom, the social dynamics are much different, and networking must be much more intentionally designed. There are typically four key occasions during a virtual course when course organizers can prompt participants to network:

1. Before the Learning Event

• Pre-course emails: This is the first opportunity to make the case to participants that despite the virtual approach, networking with your peers can be rich and impactful. Encourage participants to be more intentional and proactive networkers during the course than they might be in a face-to-face setting.
• Participant Lists: In the virtual classroom, the participant list takes on a more visible role than is typical in face-to-face learning. Get creative and use tools like Microsoft Forms or discussion forums and involve participants in creating their own personalize greetings. For example, ask participants to respond to post a photo and respond to this statement: “Here are some areas that I have worked in and have something to contribute”

 2. During Small Group Activities

• Virtual classroom tools allow participants to meet in small breakout groups concurrently during live sessions. The first breakout group session can include a networking or introductory ice breaker activity. If you change the groups later in the course, include instructions and sufficient time for participants to introduce themselves to each other.

3. During Scheduled Breaks

• Many courses include a short break during the formal live session. As participants return from break, encourage informal discussion among trainers and participants.

4. After the Learning Event

• Post-course “Office Hours” Add time at the end of a session/course for informal discussion during “office hours.” This discussion typically brings out issues that some participants feel they need more time to work on and provides a way for participants to meet others who face similar challenges.
• Post-course Emails: After the course concludes, remind participants of their new network and encourage them to reach out and support each other.

Fostering networking in a virtual event requires planning and a little creativity, and a little extra effort can go a long way to ensure participants make strong connections in a class.