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Secrets of Facilitation reveals the principles and techniques effective facilitators use to produce amazing results through groups. The author identifies 60 secrets that separate great facilitators from good ones. He then puts you right in the room through his case studies and numerous sample dialogues, so you can see and experience the techniques in action!

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Best Practices for Interactive Virtual Learning

Guest Author: Cynthia Clay, President/CEO, NetSpeed Learning Solutions

What if the best training session you attended this year happened online in an interactive web conference?

Sound impossible? Leadership Strategies partner, NetSpeed Learning Solutions has passionately embraced the mission to help trainers everywhere deliver highly interactive, engaging virtual learning. Here are some best practices to follow for the next web conference training event that you hold:

  1. Ensure that you are well-versed in your web conference platforms interactivity tools.
  2. Plan to use polling, chat, annotation tools, and whiteboards creatively to achieve the same learning objectives as your face-to-face (f2f) classroom training.
  3. Don't eliminate interaction. "Repurpose" interactive, face-to-face classroom exercises with interactive, virtual classroom exercises.
  4. Apply adult learning principles to the web conference experience—talking heads don't work in the f2f classroom or the virtual classroom (rule of thumb: no more than 3 – 5 minutes between participant interaction during your web conference training event).
  5. Don't upload the same slide presentation used in the classroom to the web conference platform. And don't send out the slide presentation prior to the web conference training.
  6. Avoid slide after slide with bullet points; instead, try visually-stimulating graphics.
  7. Encourage participants to share ideas and information using multiple modalities: chat, polling, voice-to-voice and break-out rooms.
  8. If you are repurposing classroom content, allow 4 – 10 hours of design time for every hour of delivery. That means a 90-minute webinar requires a minimum of 6 hours of advance preparation and as much as 15 hours of work before your training event.
  9. Use both a Host and Presenter during the web conference training. The Host handles technical questions; sets up polls, chats, and break-out rooms behind the scenes; and banters with the Presenter to create lively conversation.
  10. Schedule a dry run prior to the event to test the design, practice the interactivity tools, and ensure that the Host and Presenter are on the same page.
  11. Create a link to an online, post-course evaluation and make it available at the end of the web training. Participants can click on the link within the web platform to give you immediate feedback.

NetSpeed recently partnered with Adobe to present a webinar entitled The Virtual Facilitator: Learn to Make Live Online Training as Interactive and Collaborative as In-Person Training, in which they demonstrated some creative uses of interaction tools in the Adobe Connect Pro web conference platform. If you would like to view a recording of this session, please email info@netspeedlearning.com and write "Adobe Webinar Recording" in your subject line.