Four Steps to Effective Virtual Classroom Training

Step 2 — Visualize your content

As you review your outline for your virtual sessions, invest extra effort in visualizing your content. The “wall-of-words” approach is a real turn-off in all forms of e-Learning including the virtual classroom. If your message can be best communicated with words, then give learners a reading assignment and bring them to the virtual classroom to discuss and apply what they read. Here are some specific guidelines for visualizing your content.

Select visuals for their learning functions

In Graphics for Learning, my colleague Chopeta Lyons and I reviewed recent research on best use of visuals. (Two Learning Solutions Magazine overview articles based on the book are listed in the Resources section.) We recommend that you use visuals for their communication and psychological functions — not for their surface features. As a general rule, you should de-emphasize decorative graphics that can distract learners and depress learning in favor of representational visuals that illustrate the job environment, along with explanatory visuals that promote deeper understanding.

For example, Figure 5 shows a portion of a virtual classroom session using application sharing. In this lesson, Kathy Fallow of Vertex Solutions demonstrates how to use Microsoft Outlook to set up meetings. Her demonstration uses a combination of static screen captures (not shown) as well as the dynamic visuals in the application sharing facility. These types of visuals are job relevant, and help learners build mental models appropriate to the tasks they will need to perform on the job.

Figure 5 Application sharing in the virtual classroom

Explain visuals with audio and direct attention with cueing tools

Learning is better when you explain complex visuals such as software screens with audio rather than with text. This guideline, known as the modality effect, has been proven in many research studies. A complementary visual and auditory message makes best use of the visual and phonetic centers in memory and therefore minimizes memory load. In contrast, when you use text to explain visuals, the visual component of memory is overloaded and learning becomes less efficient.

Therefore, use narrative to explain visuals projected on the whiteboard or through other media projection facilities in the virtual classroom. While explaining visuals, use the many cueing tools available in the whiteboard to direct the learner’s attention to the relevant portion of the graphic. Cueing is especially important for dynamic visuals such as an animated demonstration in order to direct the learner’s attention to the features being described.

Don’t use audio, however, to provide information that learners will need to reference. Because audio is transient, it does not work well when learners need continued access to words. For example, directions to an exercise should remain visible in text on the screen so that learners can refer to them as they work through the activity.

Step 3 — Engage your learners

Engagement with instructional content is synonymous with learning. If you have designed and developed good asynchronous e-Learning, you have learned the importance of frequent effective interactions. Happily the virtual classroom offers an abundance of opportunities for participation. Here are a few guidelines.

Provide frequent, job-relevant interactions throughout your VC session

Practice opportunities yield much better benefits when they are distributed throughout a lesson rather than lumped together at the beginning or at the end. To sustain attention and maximize learning, your interactions should be very frequent. The optimal frequency will vary with your content and your participants. However, if you find yourself having gone for more than two or three minutes without some type of interaction, you run the risk of over extending participants’ attention spans and overloading their limited memory resources.

Further, you need to offer interactive opportunities that foster job-related knowledge and skills rather than trivial questions that merely ask participants to repeat back content. For example, rather than asking learners to list guidelines for writing legal interview questions, it would be better to ask them to construct questions that meet legal guidelines.

Use variety in question type and interaction format

Table 1 summarizes four types of questions I recommend using in the virtual classroom. As training professionals we are most comfortable with knowledge questions that test understanding. However, you should also make ample use of demographic, attitude, and behavior questions such the one in Figure 6. Demographic, attitude and behavioral questions help the instructor and the participants learn about each other’s backgrounds, experiences and feelings related to your topic.

Figure 6 Use plenty of demographic, attitude, and behavioral questions

For example, in the introduction to my “How to Use the Virtual Classroom” course, I ask participants about their job roles, virtual classroom experience, and course goals. Questions like these establish social presence and help the instructor learn important information about the participants.

The virtual classroom offers many diverse tools for participant involvement. If you have a large group, the polling features as well as direct messaging provide an opportunity for everyone to respond. If you want reference and reflection on everyone’s responses, ask participants to write answers on the whiteboard as shown in Figure 7. Use breakout rooms for small group discussions and projects. Just as in the physical classroom, small group assignments maximize engagement of all learners and offer the proven learning benefits of collaborative work.

Figure 7 Use the whiteboard to allow reflection on individual responses

Step 4 — Package your program

Get off to a good start by providing pre-information that helps participants with the technological issues and informs them of the logistics, course expectations and assignments, as well as any pre-work needed. Reinforce your welcome message with introductions in the virtual classroom that immediately engage your participants with the interactivity tools. Use meeting and greeting chats as participants enter the room, post your photo on an introductory slide, and ask demographic and behavioral questions to establish social presence during the early stages of your virtual session.

Design working aids for handouts

I recommend that in general, you DO NOT use copies of your slides as handouts. Instead, during your planning phases, ask yourself what kinds of working aids participants will need to apply their new knowledge and skills during and after the session. These may be step-by-step procedure guides, checklists, examples, or templates. Provide exercises that require participants to reference these handouts during the session so they are confident about using them later on the job.

Getting started in the virtual classroom

As you get started, take time to participate in some free Webinars. They are full of techniques you can adapt and apply to your sessions. And you can experience directly what did and did not work well for you from a participant perspective. Most virtual classroom tools offer free training that will get you familiar with all of the options you have and how to use them. In addition, get training that goes beyond tool features in ways that show you how to exploit those features for effective learning.

I recommend you select training delivered in the virtual classroom since you will learn directly from the content and indirectly from the way the class is conducted. I have included some options for training in the Resources list.

Finally, plan and conduct your first virtual classroom sessions with an experienced partner. Many organizations have a producer, someone with a lot of experience using virtual classroom technology, available as a guide. The producer can help you develop your program and be with you during your sessions to manage all of the small tasks that will be new to you such as clearing the polling and responding to direct messages. As you gain comfort in the virtual classroom, you will be able to assume many of the producer’s duties yourself.

Resources

Bernard, R. M. et al (2004). How does distance education compare with classroom instruction? A meta-analysis of the empirical literature. Review of Educational Research, 74:3, 379-439

Clark, R. and Kwinn, A. (2005) Seven Paths to Align Training to Business Results. Appearing in June 2005 issue of Training & Development. Available  at www.clarktraining.com

Clark, R. and Lyons, C. (2004) Graphics for Learning. Available at Amazon or www.clarktraining.com.

Clark, R. and Lyons, C. More Than Just Eye Candy: Graphics for e-Learning. (Part 1 of 2). Learning Solutions Magazine, August 11, 2003. Retrieved from http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/332/more-than-just-eye-candy-graphics-for-e-learning-part-1-of-2-parts

Clark, R. and Lyons, C. More Than Just Eye Candy: Graphics for e-Learning. (Part 2 of 2). Learning Solutions Magazine, September 15, 2003. Retrieved from http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/327/more-than-just-eye-candy-graphics-for-e-learning-part-2-of-2-parts

Clark, R. and Mayer, R. (2003). ELearning and the Science of Instruction. Available at Amazon or www.clarktraining.com

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