Six ingredients for the successful virtual classroom

Imagine you’ve just run your first virtual classroom session. You get home and decide to play through the recording of your session. You want to learn everything you can from the experience.

You reflect that the session got off to a slow start, as you provided instructions for those participants who hadn’t used the tool before, and waded point by point through the objectives and the agenda. You worry how many people you lost before you even started.

You’re quite pleased with the neat way you laid out your slides, using a contemporary PowerPoint theme. But on reflection you think every slide looked very much the same – just lots of bullet points.
After 20 minutes or so, you begin to feel your voice is sounding a bit boring. You hope your audience wasn’t feeling the same way. You wonder what you could do about it – the session lasted an hour and you were the only speaker.

You’re pleased to see that you were getting a few questions and comments in the text chat. And you think your poll went well early on in the session. But you can’t help feeling that you weren’t doing enough to keep the audience’s attention.

As the session draws to a close, you feel pleased that you’d been able to cover lots of material, although you’re doubtful whether anyone will remember that much. It all seems very dry but then again, perhaps that was just the subject.

The session finishes on time and everyone leaves. You just hope that people will make good use of what you told them. You’re not optimistic.

You press the stop button and pause to think.

Many of us will have experienced doubts like this when we first use a virtual classroom but there’s nothing inherent in the medium that means you can’t be really engaging and productive. Here are my six suggestions for a virtual classroom experience that holds attention and gets the job done.

1. Hook your learners in

Unfortunately, you can’t rely on having your audience’s attention, you really do have to earn it. Your first priority is to demonstrate why an hour with you is going to pay off in some way, by solving a current problem, providing a competitive advantage or reducing some risk. It is much, much more important to demonstrate relevance than it is to set the scene. Remember, relevance drives out resistance.

2. Use radio techniques to engage with sound

The dominant medium in the virtual classroom is sound, predominantly voice. This might seem a limitation but radio has been engaging listeners for nearly 100 years without any visual element and with no direct interaction. Think about what makes a successful radio programme and apply it in your virtual classroom. Yes, you need a lively voice and to have engaging content, but the real key is to have a variety of voices. Think about having a co-presenter or a guest speaker. Or take the opportunity to bring in members of your audience, just like phone-in callers on the radio.

3. Illuminate your ideas with imagery

Sound may be the dominant element in the virtual classroom but there is plenty of scope for visual impact as well. If you do use slides, then remember that text does not constitute a visual aid. Words are words, whether they are spoken or displayed as text, and as a general rule you want to be doing only one of these at a time. Look for strong imagery that helps to clarify your ideas and make them stick. Videos can be useful too, as long as you keep them really short.

4. Put your ideas into context using demonstrations, examples, cases and stories

There’s nothing wrong with abstractions, such as models, concepts, principles and rules, but only in very small doses. My guideline would be to support every minute of theory with ten of demonstrations, examples, cases and stories. As humans, we crave the concrete. We want to know how any new idea relates to our own knowledge and experience and it is your responsibility to make that possible.

5. Take advantage of the fact you’re live – get interactive

If you’re not going to interact with your audience, there’s absolutely no point in running a live session. If you want to present a large body of content, why not do this in advance in text, as a video or a podcast? Reserve a live session for things you cannot do any other way. Virtual classrooms provide lots of possibilities for interactivity, so use them constantly.

6. Bridge to the next step

My final recommendation is to end each session with a call to action. Make it absolutely clear what you’d like to see happen next. No learning experience stands alone – it simply moves each learner one more step on their individual learning journeys.

So, next time you sit down and play back a recording of one of your virtual sessions, make sure it’s a happy experience. Give these ideas a go and I guarantee you’ll have plenty of reasons to feel pleased with yourself.