If you are a good virtual facilitator (and after the year we have all had, I bet you are!), you have quite a few enviable skills! You’ve mastered the basics of how to teach virtually and have mastered your virtual classroom platform. (Webex® Training Center, Adobe® Connect™, Zoom, MS Teams, etc.). You consider the principles of adult learning throughout every delivery. You manage the entire experience. And so much more!

As many organizations shift to “Virtual First” as a training strategy, “good” isn’t “good enough” anymore. Facilitators need to work towards becoming exceptional at their craft. This means connecting content with people through technology. But technology is still a tool. Learning in the virtual classroom is about making connections between people. If that wasn’t important, all content could be self-paced.

The pandemic, among many of its impacts on the learning and development community, mandated a rapid shift to virtual live learning. The past year’s experience has proven that virtual classrooms are an effective part of an organization’s training strategy. Moving forward, we need to be able to reach learners wherever they are with meaningful, effective learning experiences, and the virtual classroom helps make that happen.

This post is part of an occasional series “Advice from the Virtual Trenches” where we share real lessons learned when virtual and blended learning didn’t go as planned.

Jennifer Hofmann, Founder and President of InSync Training, will present a session on “Scenario-based Learning in the Virtual Classroom” at the Virtual Training Online Conference presented by The Learning Guild on August 4-5, 2021.

When facilitating a virtual event, the facilitator has three jobs:

1. Foster environmental engagement by creating a place where people can and want to learn.
2. Stimulate intellectual engagement by encouraging learner curiosity and emphasizing content relevance and applicability.
3. Foster emotional engagement by enabling learners to feel good about the experience.

When we think of corporate learning, rarely do “fun and games” come to mind. More often than not, compliance training pops into our heads, characterized by endless slide decks, droning SMEs-turned-facilitators, and uncomfortable days spent in a classroom. Folks, training has a reputation problem. Our learners perceive traditional training as outdated and ineffective.

We often encounter some version of the following story when working with corporate teams and individual learners: “Well, my organization has made the leap to the virtual classroom. I’m now supporting live online sessions, but I don’t know how to use my existing skills while managing the technology.”

We have mentioned the role of a virtual classroom producer in several previous posts. As the support person on the delivery team, the producer is an invaluable resource before, during and after a virtual training event. He or she is there to support the facilitator, the participants and the technology.

“My Subject Matter Expert (SME) is totally devoted to the new course I’m developing! She accepts every meeting request and stays until every question is answered. When I send an email question, she is incredibly quick to get back to me and answers every question thoroughly and succinctly!”

Since March of 2020, learning and development teams have been rushing to move their face-to-face content to virtual platforms like Zoom, Webex, MS Teams, and Adobe Connect.

At first, this wholesale conversion to virtual was a stop gap measure. The focus was getting the content online temporarily - just for the few months while we were working at home. But a few months turned into a year and a half! As corporations are contemplating bringing workers back into the office (or not), they are also considering what role virtual classrooms will play in their long-term learning strategy. (Spoiler – InSync’s clients tell us virtual training will continue to play a much bigger role than it did pre-pandemic!)