Six years ago I produced my first synchronous e-Learning event. I took a well-received classroom presentation and converted it to an online synchronous presentation. I did what most people would do in this situation — I took the classroom PowerPoint slides and put them online with little or no redesign. I added some online surveys, but for the most part, the presentation was unchanged from the way it was delivered in the classroom.
When the event ran, I went back to my desk and logged on to the synchronous sessions so I could experience it as a user. Overall, the event disappointed me. It was a very different experience from seeing it in person. I found myself much less engaged as a learner than when I heard the same presentation in a classroom. In short, it was boring.
Ever since that day, I have been looking for ways to improve online synchronous events. My goal is to make them more interesting and engaging. I struggled with this until I hired a radio producer from Chicago Public Radio to review one of my synchronous sessions, critique it, and suggest ways to make synchronous events more engaging, using radio broadcast techniques. From his input came several techniques and strategies that can improve any synchronous event.
What is lost by leaving the classroom?
To start to improve synchronous events, first analyze and appreciate what you lose by leaving the classroom. Once you know what you lose, you can design to overcome these deficits. So what is lost when you leave the classroom? I count five important features.
Eye contact. Eye contact is a powerful two-way force between human beings. Eye contact between strangers is not a comfortable behavior. If someone is looking directly at you, especially someone you don’t know very well, that person does get your attention. If you are looking someone directly in the eyes, you want him to give you all of his attention. Good public speakers use eye contact to hold an audience’s attention.
In addition, a speaker can read the audience and see if they are paying attention. She can also read their body language to see if they understand the content, or if she is moving too fast.
Do not underestimate how much is lost once the instructor cannot see the audience, and vice versa.
Non-verbal communication. As anyone who has taken a public speaking class can tell you, your nonverbal communication reinforces your verbal content. Visible non-verbal communication, that is, facial expressions, body posture, and gestures can help you emphasize points. Good non-verbals (visible and audible) can help you “sell” the emotional side of your message. A speaker who is appropriately animated can hold an audience’s attention much more effectively than a speaker who stands still and who does not show any movement.
In a synchronous environment, you lose the ability to use the visible non-verbal communication channels. So you lose key tools in your speaker’s toolbox to grab and hold people’s attention.
Freedom from distractions. In a classroom the learners may have relatively little to distract them from the instructor. In a synchronous session, however, participants are most likely at their desks at work, taking the session on their computers. This environment is rife with distractions. Learners could have people talking to them, emails coming in, voice mails to check, Instant Messaging etc. You get the picture. Maybe you have experienced it.
Controlled environment. In addition to external distractions, participants in synchronous communication also have a degree of freedom that they never had in a classroom. They are not just victims of external distractions. If your session is not engaging them, they will exercise this new freedom by initiating emails, phone calls, conversations, etc ... they might never think of doing these things in the classroom.
Peer pressure. Imagine that you are at a conference and you see in the conference guide a presentation that sounds really interesting. You go to the presentation early and sit in the front row. Three minutes into the presentation, you realize that it is not what you expected and that this presentation will just be a waste of your time. What to do? You want to stand up and leave. But you think twice about standing up and leaving because you don’t want to be rude to the speaker and the other people in the room.
In a synchronous environment this “peer pressure,” or need to be polite, that holds people in their seats is gone. Now people can leave your session guilt-free with one click of their mouse because no one is watching them.
So, without redesign, your synchronous event is in danger of being inferior compared to the same presentation in the classroom because you lose eye contact and the visible non-verbal cues that help you maintain attention, and you lose support from peer pressure. At the same time, if you produce an inferior product, the audience has new distractions, freedom, and the ability to leave your session unnoticed.
What tools can you leverage online?
This is a serious problem. What are organizations doing about it as they produce synchronous events? The answer: not much!
The biggest mistake I see is that people are doing what I did the first time I produced with this technology. They are taking PowerPoint presentations that worked in the classroom, and broadcasting them online, with little or no redesign for this medium.
To be successful we need to design synchronous sessions that will overcome what is lost when you leave the classroom. To do this, we need to emphasize and make the most of what we have NOT lost, and take advantage of what we have gained to engage the learner.
So, let’s take a look at what we have not lost, to determine what we can use to improve synchronous events. At the highest level, a synchronous event uses these four components to communicate with and engage the audience.
- Visuals
- Interactivity
- Chat
- Audio
All of these are important in any synchronous event. But of these four techniques, which is the most important? That is, which one holds learners in your session every second of the presentation? Which is the component that you could least afford to lose? To answer these questions let’s analyze them one by one.
Visual elements
When I first started to develop synchronous e-Learning, I considered it a visual medium. I don’t anymore. Don’t get me wrong, the right graphics in synchronous communications, or PowerPoint for that matter, are important. A good visual can illustrate a point or organize content. But this is not TV, or even a photograph. As visual information display expert Edward Tufte points out, “PowerPoint slides projected up on a wall are very low resolution — compared to paper, 35 mm slides, and the immensely greater capacities of the human eye-brain system.” Since synchronous graphics are PowerPoint based, you can expect to have the same, or less, resolution in your presentation. In reality, you can’t effectively have much text and graphics on a slide. This limits the amount of information you can communicate visually.
Also, compared to video, the visuals in synchronous communication are static. The frames in video change approximately every 1/24th of a second. How often do the slides in a synchronous session change? This depends on the speaker, but it can be as infrequently as once every five minutes, and it is rare if it is less than every two minutes. Are these slides communicating for the entire time they appear? The human brain can take in visual information in seconds. A PowerPoint slide containing 40 words may require as little as eight seconds to read silently. So, if one of your slides appears for three minutes in a presentation, your audience “got it” in the first few seconds. At this point, we have to ask ourselves, what purpose is the visual serving during the rest of the time?
I am not proposing that you ignore your graphics, or that you show more graphics at a faster rate to attempt to emulate video. Just understand the limits of this technology in displaying information visually. Your graphics may help you make a point, but they will not engage your audience throughout your session.
Interactivity
We can give the learner much more interactivity in a synchronous event than we normally can (or do) in the classroom. This is actually a big advantage of synchronous communication over the classroom. Most classrooms do not have the technology support needed to take polls and surveys, and then collate the data instantaneously as we can online. Interactivity provides many opportunities to engage the learner and improve any presentation. For example, you can use interactivity to gain information from the audience so you can tailor the content on the fly in order to make sure it meets their needs. Good interactivity stimulates users and leads to good questions for the instructor, as well as good discussion in the chat area.
However, it is difficult to have meaningful interactions for the audience more often than once every five minutes. If you have interactive exercises too frequently, it will break up the flow of your presentation. Interactivity will not hold your audience in your session second by second.
Chat
Since the first grade, we have been told to sit in our chairs, listen to the teacher, and to not talk in class. That would disrupt the presentation and distract the other learners. In a classroom, this is still true today. But, once you go into a synchronous environment, all of this changes. Now your participants can use the chat feature in most synchronous tools to carry on conversations and it will not distract the speaker. Like interactivity, this is an advantage that synchronous training has over the classroom, and even over asynchronous training. The potential to engage your audience with chat is great. If you can make it one-fourth as interesting as teenagers find Instant Messaging and texting, then your presentation and the sideline discussions will so occupy your audience that they will not think of checking their emails.
Although chat is constant, it is, unfortunately, your participants who drive its content. It is out of your control, so you can’t depend on it to deliver your key messages. Chat is great at holding your audience in a session, but it is not the most important of the four components in your synchronous event.
Audio
Unlike visuals and interactivity in a synchronous session, audio is constantly present. Imagine that the audio in a synchronous session stopped for 15 seconds. That “dead air” could be a disaster for your session. If you went 10 minutes with the same graphics, it would be boring but might not be a disaster. If an entire synchronous event contained no interactivity or chat it would be a shame, but it would not necessarily be a disaster. The reality is that the audio of a synchronous event never stops, and should never stop.
Audio delivers the vast majority of your content in synchronous sessions. This is even true with the majority of TV news broadcasts. Ask yourself, is your experience of a TV news broadcast a visual or an auditory experience? Let’s do a quick thought experiment to illustrate the power of audio in TV, and how we take it for granted.
First, imagine that you are on a treadmill at a health club. Above the treadmill a TV is tuned to CNN, but the audio is off. You watch the TV and see foreign soldiers walking through a rainforest. You see some wreckage You see a man talking whom you have never seen before, and then you see Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talking. What have you learned by just seeing this news and not hearing a word? You don’t really know what happened. You don’t know where. You don’t know a whole lot more than you did before you saw the news.
Now let’s experience this same video clip in a different way. You are preparing dinner in the kitchen with the TV on. You are cutting an onion, and you can’t watch the TV because your eyes are watering and you need to concentrate so you do not cut your fingers. While you listen to the TV, you hear that rebels in Columbia have bombed an oil pipeline. You learned that the blast was in retaliation for a recent crackdown from the Columbian government. You learned what the Columbian government’s planned response would be from the Columbian Interior Minister. You learn, from a woman that sounds like Condoleezza Rice, the specifics of the State Department’s plans to help the Columbian government. What have you learned by just hearing the news and not seeing any of it? You know what happened. You know where. You know more about the whole story than you would have gained from watching the video without sound.
In this example, you learned much more from the audio alone than you did from the visuals alone. You learned details of the story that just don’t come across in the visuals. Yes, there are TV news stories where the visuals are crucial and will tell you more than the audio. Think about the visual images of the floodwaters after hurricane Katrina. Words could not do justice to that story the way a few seconds of video did. But in all news stories, the audio plays a crucial role, and in many cases is clearly the more important of the two media.
Ask yourself what kind of content you need to communicate with a synchronous event. A majority of topics in corporate training are not visual in nature. How visual (relatively) is sales training, project management, C++ updates or teaching accountants about Sarbanes-Oxley revisions? Many content areas in corporate or adult education will not be primarily visual, and so audio will be the workhorse method for communicating your content.
The bottom line
Audio is extremely important in any broadcast communication. Audio is the main technology that can hold participants in a synchronous e-Learning session, and it is the medium conveying a majority of your content.
But, what is being done to improve audio in synchronous sessions? Not much. Most people take the audio for granted, and do not make the effort to improve it.
Luckily, there is a technology that has successfully been attracting and holding audiences for more than 90 years. Radio has been a very successful means of communication and entertainment without eye contact or visible non-verbal behaviors. Because of this, in my opinion, radio is a better model for developing synchronous sessions than the corporate PowerPoint presentation.
