Four Simple Tips To Make Online Learning Suck Less As A Facilitator
Yes, Kahoot works, but there are other ways to enhance the experience.
The sentiment on my Linkedin feed at the start of the lockdown in 2020 was cautious optimism — more time with family, an occasion to re-assess work life balance, a challenge to the need for expensive office leases, an opportunity in disguise to upskill during the quieter periods.
Remember all the “inspirational” posts about how lockdown was going to be Your Year To Learn New Things?
More than 12 months later, that optimism has been greatly tempered.
The last time I participated in a virtual training session, it quickly devolved into a hazy 80’s Sunday afternoon — my MS Teams calls were just radios to tune into while I stared at the ceiling. Not engaged enough to retain the info, too distracted to progress on other work items while it was going on, the hours counted down and I patted myself on the back for showing up even if nothing made it in.
Hooray. One step closer to the learning hours quota.
I am a regular facilitator for training workshops in my company. Keen to make a difference, I experimented, and I want to share what I’ve gained as a result: four tips which resonate with participants and make the process of online learning better.
These emerged from the corporate setting, but I believe they are applicable in almost every setting where some kind of online learning is deployed.
Tip 1: Break the Ice
In the beginning, remote training was a new conquest. We had the privilege of delivering the first ever completely remote Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) training and certification session in Australia. The training and materials were never designed with Microsoft Teams in mind, and it took much trial and error to reconfigure breakout rooms, group activities and discussions for a socially distant setting.
We got better at it. It became “normal” for us to facilitate in this new way. With each session we got more efficient at delivering content.
And there lay a new problem. We lost sight of the opportunities these sessions provided for remote workers to connect with each other.
So the next time, we kicked off with an icebreaker. It was simple: I’d share a whiteboard in MS Teams and participants had three minutes to find a corner and sketch a creature that best embodied their current project. We then went around having people explain their choices.
We got snakes, elephants, butterflies, multi-headed dragons. And people warmed up a lot more to us and each other. It was a few minutes that completely changed the tone of a four hour session.
It rarely matters how senior they might be or how austere they may come off as. Participants have ideas they want to express and are likely appreciative of the chance to be creative; and want their work shared with others.
Yes, the main goal of the sessions was always upskilling. But that doesn’t mean we can’t facilitate the secondary goal of much needed informal social engagement.
Tip 2: Insist on house rules
Just as there are always champions in every group who lead discussions, there will always be participants that fall in the lower percentile of engagement due to factors both within and beyond their control.
The target here is to tip the balance towards the former. To build healthy group dynamics, reciprocation is necessary.
Being made to ask unresponsive profile pictures what they think about the group activity prompt in front of them is a terrible experience.
Internet instability is a pain, but encourage and model switching on webcams in small groups anyways. If you’re not using the model of a main room and virtual breakouts, strongly consider it — a bit of setup yields great dividends in discussions.
This can take the form of facilitators popping into virtual breakouts on mute with their cam on, and gentle reminders for teams to do the same. You don’t need to be coy, and I usually openly explain why I press for it: You’re not doing it for me, you’re doing it for the experience of your small group.
Other rules we use:
- When moving between virtual breakouts and main rooms, have teams proactively report their return in the chat: eg “Group 1 is back”
- When either participant or facilitator alike has to leave their desk for whatever reason, let the rest know by leaving a note in the chat
- If you are running sessions across multiple days, remind participants at the start and end of each day what the expectations on them are in terms of presence
Such house rules serve to mimic in-person presence on the virtual stage. It’s a pale imitation of in-person learning, but imitation is better than nothing.
This insistence can feel tiresome, unwanted and low-value. But as the facilitator, you are the originator and champion of delivering the session, including behaviors and dynamics.
If you do not defend the social contract you proposed, who will?
Eventually we want to see the shift towards “everyone”, not just “me”, but someone has to start role modelling to get there.
Depending on your situation, you may find it worthwhile to identify active participants, commend them for their behaviors, and enlist them in maintaining and encouraging the positive dynamic.
The reality is that as facilitators we have to work much harder to explicitly create the same kind of peer awareness that being together in person implicitly imposes. But it’s work that yields rewards.
Tip 3: Share the stage
It’s unnerving to have participants share when you’ve got a fixed amount of content and a fixed amount of time.
When I first did this, we lost time and had to rush through the other content, or assign it as something to be read separately if they wished. Was it worth the detour? Surely not, I thought, since the session was incomplete.
Except, the participants didn’t see it that way.
Sure, it went overtime, and the ending was scrambled, but it felt more like a forum and dialogue. People were encouraged not just to hear different voices, but to add their own to the mix if they wished. They reported that the wider range of perspectives was interesting, and that in back-and-forths — what I had thought was getting into the weeds — they found new insights.
The pessimistic part of me thought they didn’t know what they missed out on. The optimistic part of me realized they had simply found something better.
The not-so-secret secret of facilitation is that it’s more fun to speak than listen.
There’s power here to leverage if you want to engage your audience: make them feel like they have something to bring to the table, and they’ll gain more ownership and thus engagement.
But channel that power unwisely and you’ll run out of time, or worse, turn the session into a hostage situation where a handful of participants take over in the direction they want to go.
Where the right balance is depends on you, your material and your group, but some general things I think about are:
- As part of planning, how much time can I budget for participant sharing?
- When picking what to bring up with everyone, can the question or sharing be leveraged to illustrate or add to the content I need to deliver?
- Does their conversation appeal to the whole group, and not just themselves? If not, can it lead to material that will appeal to the whole group?
- If the conversation is too specific and won’t lead to other material, how will I re-rail the session? And for how long should I let it run? (It’s some variant of “Interesting, thank you. How about we park the rest of that for the end of the session.”)
Tip 4: Create feedback loops on how to improve
No, this isn’t a cheeky recursive argument. It’s the call to be mindful about continuous improvement.
Always set time aside for both benefits and concerns at the end of sessions. What did we do well? Acknowledge it. What can we improve on? Take notes and apply the next iteration.
Can we substitute X section with a Miro activity instead? Can we skip past Y section in favour of more personal stories and illustrations? Can we give participants more break time?
The answers to these ideas are not always “Yes”, but I have been inspired time and again to think outside of the box and challenge the norm in ways I wouldn’t have thought of because of feedback.
From then, it’s finding opportunities to experiment, with a hypothesis and measurable goals.
I’ve substituted X section with a Miro activity. How will we do in terms of time cost vs engagement?
Challenge your conventions. Do you really need to barrel through everything for them to get the idea you want to convey? Is it really okay to have them sit there for an hour, over an hour, with no opportunity for interaction? And is it really so bad if my experiment doesn’t turn out exactly as I had hoped?
Be open about the process: you want to collaborate with your participants on making the situation better for everyone.
Give participants the sense that you’re just clocking it in, and their expectations of subsequent online sessions are set.
Give participants the sense that you will improve the experience, and their expectations of subsequent online sessions will be raised.
In a poetic way, we truly are all in this together as facilitators — as faceless forces here to run people through dense slide decks, imposers of fruitless group activities, as factory learning overseers. To the remote participant, it’s easy to form a view of all of us as the same.
But when you make the effort to close the gap — by creating opportunities for a bit of fun, by upholding good practices that humanise everyone, and by genuinely wanting to learn from them — you challenge that perception.
And perhaps some of that 2020 optimism can be rekindled for when we make it out on the other side.
If you’re a facilitator, what tips and tricks do you use to make online learning better? If you’re a regular participant, what are the techniques or changes that really resonated with you? I’d be keen to see your thoughts in the comments, and please share this with others who may find this useful.
