By Rick Nigol
 Life is full of ironies. In
preparation for our webinar this week titled Going Live: Best
Practices in Online Synchronous Training, we had planned to stress
that "going live" was much like tightrope walking without a net, and
that things can and will go wrong. The point is to be ready for this
and to work your way through it. Well, wouldn't you know it, as the
webinar was about to begin, none of the tools that controlled sound
appeared on my chairperson's screen. This is akin to taking off in
an airplane and missing half of the controls on your instrument
panel. So instead of just talking about what can go wrong in a
synchronous learning environment, we were able to demonstrate this
(good teaching strategy, eh?).
Luckily, we had Jennifer Hofmann of InSync
Training as our special guest expert, and she has seen and done it
all with respect to web conferencing. As she rightly pointed out,
all that can be done in such situations is to explain to
participants what is happening, what we needed the participants to
do, and how we would work our way around it, while the technical
people worked in the background trying to figure out what went
wrong. Never panic, as this solves nothing and only serves to
increase the anxiety of participants.
So we soldiered on under less than ideal
circumstances and Jennifer was able to share her perspectives on
what makes for a productive online synchronous training event:
Planning: Take care to script
out fully all aspects of the event by time references, topic,
content, learning objective, instructional method, planned
interactions, and required media / materials.
Chunking: Online synchronous
learning events can be very intense, so do not expect that you can
spend the same amount of time as you may with an in-person training
event. Do not go any more than two hours per session, or you will
begin losing participants' attention, no matter how engaging your
training event.
Interaction: This is important
for the success of any training initiative, but even more crucial
for online synchronous learning as it is so easy for learners to be
distracted by other things at their desks. Doing things such as
asking questions, providing problems, gathering opinions, sharing
experiences, working on cases, etc., will keep learners
engaged.
Collaboration: Learner
engagement can also be improved by building in collaborative
exercises (e.g. collective brain storming via white boards).
Go With the Flow: Technical
glitches will happen. Take these in stride, be ready for them, have
back-up plans, let participants know what is happening, and just
work your way through as best as you can.
Many webinar participants let us know that they
are experimenting with online synchronous learning in their
organizations. They are doing so for a range of training challenges
such as safety training, product knowledge sessions, system demos,
and soft skills training. Jennifer assured everyone that we are all
new to this new way of engaging learners and are all learning our
way as we go. Although web conferencing technology has been around
for some time, it is only recently that we are seeing its widespread
adoption for training purposes.
I usually provide a link to a recording of our
webinars, but we don't have one in this instance.....technical
problems don't you know...
The Peer Network is a limited
membership group of organizations that seek to close the gap
between the knowing of best practices in eLearning, and
applying those best practices to their current projects.
They collaborate, interact, share, and learn together through
a series of live online and in-person events. If you're
serious about taking your eLearning to the next level, we
invite you to join us!
To have a casual chat to
determine if this is something that can help your
organization, contact Jon-Anthony at 416-238-3297, or jon@elearncampus.com.
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