Synchronous online learning – web-based training that takes place real-time and instructor led – is becoming a hotter and hotter topic in the training world.

But good online instructors are hard to find. Why?

Because many trainers coming from the physical classroom don’t realize that many of the old tricks that they relied on there just don’t apply here. They learn the technology, but they deliver the content in the same old ways. In the virtual classroom, you’re robbed of many of your old familiar resources. Sight, for one thing. Body language. The ability to immediately check work. A class full of people who can interact with you and each other in ways they’re comfortable with. Your own physical presence and charisma holding the whole show together.

The biggest challenge you’ll face in the virtual classroom is that you’re no longer necessarily the star of the show. You’ll have to compete with your participants’ physical environment – which, more often than not, is their office: the desk on which work is piled, the phone ringing, the emails flowing in, the coworkers dropping by. And you aren’t even a face they have to, well, face; they don’t have to look you in the eye if they misbehave. In fact, you won’t even know if they decide to check out for a while to take care of some things in their real world. Keeping participants engaged is the key to success as a virtual trainer, and here’s how to do it:

Talk.
One of the hardest things for online instructors to learn when they first start out is that they cannot, under any circumstance, fall silent. The flow of communication coming from you must be constant. Think about what happens when you’re listening to a radio station and there’s several seconds of silence at the end of a song. As the seconds stretch out, you inevitably reach for the dial. Your students will do the same. This can be a particularly difficult habit to form when you are also doing something else, like loading a survey or quiz, following chat, or doing application sharing. It takes a lot of practice, but you must keep silence at bay at all times.

Get them to talk.
Uncomfortable with fighting silence constantly? You aren’t the only one who can fill it. Getting your participants involved in discussion is one of the best ways to keep them engaged. Ask for real-life experiences related to the topic you’re teaching, or if anyone has come across a particular feature or issue before. Ask for an answer or an example. Ask them what superpower they’d choose, if they could have any one they wanted. Anything at all to keep them involved in the dialogue.

Free yourself to teach.
Multitasking in this environment can be difficult, and too often the glaring silence that is the kiss of death for your class is the result of trying to do too many things at once. If you’ll be application sharing during the session, open the application and the file you’ll be using before class starts. Make sure any tests or surveys you’ll be giving in class are set up in advance. When possible, get a co-facilitator to stage lessons, monitor chat, and provide technical or other types of support if participants are having problems. If this resource is not available, protect yourself from distractions by giving out a phone number for technical support up front, and letting participants know you will only be monitoring chat during breaks and exercises.

Flair matters more.
You’ll need all the skills that make you a dynamic trainer in the classroom, intensified. Remember that your participants can’t see you or see or hear their classmates. Their only stimulus is what they see on the screen, and your voice. So you need to turn it up a notch. When teaching in the virtual classroom, you aren’t so much a trainer as a DJ or an MC. Perform.

Interaction is the name of this game.
In the physical classroom, more often than not you can command attention simply on the basis of presence and eye contact. The virtual classroom does not afford these luxuries. Without a constant impetus to keep their focus on the screen, your participants will wander off to other things. And you are miles away, powerless to stop it. That impetus is interaction. Build in some form of it every two minutes.

Interaction must be varied.
You can’t just say, “Please choose Yes or No to indicate whether you have any questions” every two minutes, and have that count. Yes/No questions are fine, but you need to mix them up with other forms of interaction. Use all the tools your chosen delivery application provides. Post a survey or a quiz. Start a live discussion and call on students at random. Use chat, white boarding, and application sharing to mix it up.

Let them drive.
Apply the show-don’t-tell principle as often as possible. Demonstrating something using application sharing? There’s no reason you need to maintain control of the mouse at all times. Ask for a volunteer or select a student, give them control and verbally walk them through all the steps. This adds to the interaction, and the possibility of stepping up to the microphone keeps your class on their toes.

Tell them to go away.
No matter how interesting and interactive your class is, they are not going to pay attention to it for more than an hour at a stretch, maybe ninety minutes if you’re a world class entertainer.

So what do you do if you have more than an hour’s worth of material? Send them off on their own at intervals. Not only will this provide them a chance to stretch, relax their eyes, and refresh themselves, but it’s necessary for learning; adult learning theory applies as much online as it does anyplace, and people need practice to learn.

Make sure the workbook that accompanies the class contains independent exercises, and assign one periodically. Participants can use the chat or audio mechanisms built into your delivery application to talk amongst themselves or ask you questions as they’re working. Then, the class reconvenes after a pre-agreed upon amount of time to debrief the exercise. Many instructors like to play music or post a countdown timer during exercise time, to maintain some feeling of connection to the classroom.

The right experience level is crucial – theirs, not yours.
Most trainers at one time or another have had a participant who didn’t have the prerequisite amount of experience come to an intermediate or advanced level class anyway. You know what a nuisance this can be. But with online learning, it’s more than that. It’s detrimental to their learning. You have no visual cues to sense any lack of comprehension and frustration. Even if you do catch it, or they speak up, you’ve got a problem. Because it’s so much harder to keep the audience engaged online, when you spend an inordinate amount of time with one participant, you’re guaranteed to lose the others.

It is critical that you set expectations at the beginning of class about the experience level assumed and required, and that you teach to that level without exception.

Practice.
There’s no winging it here. With online learning, there is simply no substitute for good, old fashioned practice. You’ll find that you need a lot of prep time up front, and that even after you’ve been doing it for a while, teaching online can be much more exhausting than teaching in the classroom. But it can also be more fun, if you have fun with it.

© 2001 Jennifer Rasmussen, All Rights Reserved.

Email Jen or visit her website at www.rasmussencentral.com