In the world of virtual classrooms, there are many reasons why a session may be ineffective and tiring for both participants and facilitators. Whether the technological tools are used too sparingly or interaction between participants is not encouraged enough, a session can feel stagnant and end up not being successful. I’m sharing some of my observations I’ve made in the online classroom along with suggestions to help ensure that your sessions are engaging, fun, and learners are energized with new knowledge to apply to their jobs.

Nothing changed our workplace more, and more quickly, than the Covid-19 pandemic, and we all need coping skills to keep up. Facilitators need to be especially vigilant in order to ensure their learners are positively connected to the learning experience. 

Karen Vieth revisits  “Seven Facilitation Techniques That Nurture Emotional Engagement in the Virtual Classroom” in our Virtually There session Emotional Intelligence and Engaging Your Audience in the Virtual Classroom. on March 10. She ties EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT to EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, and discusses how important it is to the workplace, providing techniques to help facilitators nurture emotional engagement.

Read the blog below, originally published in 2019, to learn more about how effective learning involves an emotional component.

This is the third installment in a series that explores actionable approaches virtual classroom facilitators can use to improve learner engagement through purposeful facilitation.

We often frame corporate training as a compulsory process: complete these requirements and move on to the next task. It's a reinforcement of a "Push" learning culture that is content-centric, and not a personal experience.

Effective learning involves an emotional component. Employees want to do well on the job. They hope to have the skills required to meet their goals. They stress about balancing their professional responsibilities while upskilling. The training function has an obligation to recognize these emotions, and facilitators can improve virtual training experiences by addressing them in their delivery approach.

Keeping learners engaged - it’s the boundless task as a facilitator.  There are a whole heap of ideas and tactics that work but here’s one I have used that may be a bit different… Shock your learners!  Embarrass yourself!  Give them what they never expected, SING loud and proud😊

Lynette Van Steinburg has been contributing to the InSync Training team as a virtual producer since 2018. In this blog post, she shares some tips to help both the learners and the trainers stay focused without getting burned out.

In my previous post, I discussed the importance of strong design for virtual delivery, and how to achieve it. This post addresses the challenges you’ll encounter when proposing these design approaches to your stakeholders.

Wait a minute...

With the unexpected arrival (at least at a much greater level) of teleworking and online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many trainers and facilitators have struggled to find the most suitable solution to deliver their classes to their students.

This boom in live remote learning has caused much debate about whether or not platforms help facilitators meet the expectations of their own students (and themselves) or whether online teaching is less stellar and effective than face-to-face classes.

A few years back, InSync producer Jakob Hofmann wrote some fun producer haiku.

I don’t remember what prompted this tweet in January, 2012, but I feel it even more strongly now than I did then. Since the onset of COVID, we have seen 3 phases of its effects on training and training delivery:

Years ago when I was teaching virtual facilitation skills, there was a section called “disaster recovery”. I poked fun at this, saying it seemed a bit too dramatic and asking if there had ever really been a Code Blue in a breakout room. Truth is, though, sometimes things do go wrong, and great staff with a great plan can keep hiccups from turning into full-blown failures.

While researching evidence-based practices for the virtual classroom, I was looking for specific examples of activities that supported proven approaches like retrieval practice and feedback. What I found mostly were hundreds -- literally hundreds -- of sites and blog posts and articles promising ideas for “engagement and interaction” that were usually nothing more than lists of “icebreakers”, often just the same ones repeated from site to site and post to post. And y’all: I remember doing “2 Truths and a Lie” at a trainers meeting in 1996, and it wasn’t new then.