Sharing Our Best Practices
FOR LIVE ONLINE TRAINING (VILT)
Living in this new world, and many of us working from home, we’re hearing from many of our partners struggling with converting on-site training classes into a live online format.
And we know how important it still is to keep employees engaged and continue to help grow their companies. You and your staff need to remain prepared.
We’ve been delivering on-site and online training since 2005. So, we’d like to help you and share our best practices. Come join Jeff Moore, our VP of Delivery, as he hosts this informal office hours. We’ll share our best practices and allow all attendees to ask any questions as well.
We currently us Zoom for our online (VILT) training deliveries. At the bottom of this page, we’ve also included some Zoom specific tips as well. We also compiled additional general resources to help those companies working from home.
Below is the recording from our second office hours. Stay tuned for our next live office hours soon!
Below is the recording from our first office hours. Stay tuned for our next live office hours soon!
This is the MOST important part of a virtual delivery and requires more time than a face-to-face delivery. Create objectives, a detailed agenda, activities, time allotment for each topic, polls you want to ask during the training, etc. Once the materials are created, take time to practice walking through the training, checking the time allotment, creating questions to ask, and ensuring you are incorporating a variety of experiences for your participants (e.g. discussion, activities, breakouts, individual work, lab work, etc.).
Join at least fifteen (15) minutes prior to the scheduled course start time. When students start arriving at the meeting, interact with them. Feel free to ask them questions and have them ask YOU questions. This is a good time to ask a poll question and/or provide a slide with directions on how to log in, use their mute buttons, etc.
The Project Manager is your “buddy” and he/she is available to help ensure a smooth start to the course. Students may experience technical difficulties while attempting to log-in. In this scenario, please use your Project Manager to assist with trouble-shooting, as to not delay the start of your course.
Participants should agree on the ground rules, especially if this is a multi-day training, to ensure they hold one another accountable for a great virtual classroom experience. Some examples include: Be on time, 100% participation, minimize background noises, 1 person speaking at a time.
You are already at a disadvantage in a virtual environment where you can’t easily see what the participants are doing, how they’re feeling, etc., so it’s important to use all the tools Zoom has to offer. Practice sharing your screen, annotating, having your participants annotate, chat, and use breakout rooms. Using video can help improve engagement and interaction, allowing everyone to see what’s happening, and at the same time making it harder for someone to multitask or “tune out”.
If a second monitor is available to you, we highly recommend using it as a value-added tool. We suggest hosting the screen share on your primary display, while utilizing the second monitor to display the participant list, chat, videos, and polling. This enables you to have a higher level of engagement with students, while having easy access to the Zoom tools.
The beauty of our VILTs is that it is a synchronous experience for you and your audience. Treat it as you would an in-person presentation by mixing it up every 5-10 minutes (discussions, polling, labs, breakout groups, chat, individual work, etc.). This will drive engagement and interest in your topic and keep participants involved and learning.
Select your location in advance and make sure your internet access is stable. Ensure that your devices are plugged in and that chargers are easily accessible. The location background should be interesting, but not distracting. It is important that your face is clearly visible, and that there is not a glare from any nearby windows. And make sure you have a clean space.
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Zoom allows for screen sharing on desktop, tablet and mobile devices running Zoom. When running a VILT, it is important to share your screen at all times.
Note: If you are using slides during your delivery, please make an opening slide with the “WELCOME TO COURSE NAME” text and utilize the DI Instructor Slide Deck
The whiteboard feature allows the host to share a whiteboard with other participants. If allowed, other participants can annotate on the whiteboard.
Note: The annotation tools will appear automatically. Choose the Whiteboard option in the meeting controls to show and/or hide the tools.
The polling feature allows the Instructor to assess knowledge and increase participant engagement. The feature allows the host to create single choice or multiple-choice polling questions. We recommend you create the polls prior to the session and can then launch the poll during the course to gather the responses from the attendees. You also have the ability to download a polling report, after the meeting.
The polling feature is a great tool to gauge learning, or for initiating an ICE-BREAKER, such as:
Which superpower would you like to have?
In 2030, who will people trust more with their babies? Robots or human baby-sitters?
Note: Zoom allows up to twenty-five (25) polls per scheduled meeting/course.
The purpose of breakout rooms is to allow the participants to meet in smaller groups to continue a brainstorming session, conduct an activity, or practice something that was just learned. Breakout Rooms allow the host to split the Zoom meeting into numerous groups (called sessions), with a varying number of participants per session. The meeting host can choose to split the participants of the meeting into these separate sessions automatically or manually and can switch between sessions at any time.
Note: The host can create up to 50 breakout rooms. There is a maximum of two-hundred (200) participants in a breakout room. Breakout room participants have full audio, video and screen sharing capabilities
This feature will show the meeting host if an attendee has minimized the Zoom screen. This tool helps to identify those students who may be distracted by showing when they are “away” from the Zoom screen for more than 30 seconds. However, this can be misleading because if they are using multiple screens they might be paying attention but the tracker will show them as “away”.
Note: The default is set to ON. The clock icon will show next to any participants name who has not had the Zoom screen in focus for more than 30 seconds.
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