WebEx Tip: Pop-Up Note
If you'd like to have a pop-up welcome note as people join your WebEx Session, you can program it when you schedule your class, OR if you are opening a session spontaneously, go to the menu bar: Meeting > Welcome Message. It will open a new browser window and you can type your message. Be sure to check "Display this message when attendees join the meeting."
The result: As each new attendee joins, this message window will pop up over the WebEx interface. Useful for introducing yourself, giving instructions (e.g. "Be sure to close down your email."), or providing alternate call-in numbers, if needed.
Why Utilize a Virtual Classroom?
Book Excerpt from "Tailored Learning":
The ability to interact with experts and peers in real time is a comfortable and familiar environment and eliminates the isolation that often comes with asynchronous technologies. Often a participant requires live interaction with an instructor or an expert, but that interaction does not need to be face-to-face.
For example, medical students observing surgery would, arguably, benefit from being physically in the operating room or a surgical observation area. However, those same participants do not need face-to-face interaction to ask post-operative questions of the surgeon. Questions can be asked and discussed among all of the participants via a virtual classroom. If a recording is made of the synchronous discussion, all the participants can go back and review the recording, at any time, to ensure that they understood the answers. One of the most common reasons for organizations to implement a virtual classroom is an audience that is dispersed across a large geographic area (oftentimes worldwide). Compared with traditional classroom delivery, the money saved in classroom costs, travel, and time away from work quickly becomes apparent. In addition, organizations may choose to deliver content that they never would have scheduled in a more traditional (classroom) setting. For example, an update to a computer system may only take one or two hours to teach, but an organization would rarely convene a training program for such a short period of time because it would be cost prohibitive. The virtual classroom makes this type of content easy to distribute.
As organizations become more global, and the need to collaborate across a distance is becoming more important, a virtual meeting place can help close the distance gap by providing a forum through which employees collaborate in real time.
Online learning is gaining in "popularity"
Interest in online learning is growing rapidly, while interest in traditional education is waning. From 2012 - 2013, distance education enrollment rose 1.8% compared with a drop of 4% in overall higher education enrollment according to the US Department of Education.
What does this mean for us? As trainers? It means our new hires are coming to us already equipped to be successful while learning virtually.
Adobe Connect Tip - for easier classroom management
One of the wonderful things about Adobe Connect is the fact that the pods make it so malleable... one of the maddening things about Adobe Connect is trying to get all those pods in place easily and at the right time.
One option: Create a layout for your activity instead.
Say, for example, your activity is for participants to respond to the question, How Do You Create the Perfect Impression on a New Client? What do you do before, during and after the sales call? and you have a separate chat pod for each response (before, during, after). Rather than try to move the pods in to the participant viewing area quickly and neatly, use a separate layout where they are already set up. Then, with one click, you can move the whole group to the layout.
From the menu bar, click Layout > Create New Layout
Then choose to create a blank layout (you will have to bring in every pod you want in this layout) or duplicate an existing layout (if you know you want video, attendee list and chat, you might want to duplicate the standard 'sharing' layout)
Give the layout a name so you can easily find it in the list of layouts on the right of your screen (using our example above, we'd probably call this layout Before, During, After)
Click OK. Populate the room with whatever pods you need (again, using our example, we'd need 3 chat pods)
Now, when that time in the course arrives, simply click on the Before, During, After layout thumbnail and voila! your three chat pods are at the ready and participants can begin their activity much more quickly.
Quotable: Lora Reed
Online learning is "consistent with where we are going with employers and teams." Employers need people who are self-motivated and who can work independently and collaborate online with colleagues, including critiquing each other's work - exactly the skills that online learning builds.
Lora Reed, Assistant Professor, Ashford University Forbes School of Business as quoted in HR Magazine, May 2015
Online Collaboration MUST be Designed
One of the most wonderful things about the online classroom is the ability to bring learners together who may otherwise be geographically separated. If one individual in New York and one individual in Arizona need the same training, the virtual classroom not only allows them to partake in that training without travel, but also to take that training with fellow learners.
Too often, however, the virtual classroom is used in presentation-mode rather than in collaborative-mode.
All virtual classroom platforms pledge that their product enables your organization and your learners to work collaboratively. And it is true. All virtual classroom platforms allow for learners to interact verbally, via chat or instant messenger, through the use of feedback symbols or emoticons, and often through breakout rooms which enable smaller discussions and group activities to occur.
This doesn't just happen spontaneously, however. It is imperative that the training be designed to be collaborative.
One of the basic tenets of adult learning is that adults prefer to learn collaboratively; in other words adults prefer to learn with others. Therefore, it is imperative that the focus of the learning process is on the learners working together, discussing, questioning, problem solving, and in general, contributing to the learning process and the learning content.
As Instructional Designers, we must put quite a bit of thought into how we can ensure the learners work together to achieve the learning outcome, rather than sitting at their individual sites being passive recipients of a presentation.
The "Problem" With Virtual Learning
We recently read this blog post which really made our blood to boil!
In a nutshell, the writer, a college professor, finds himself stranded at the airport and decides his situation should not impede his regularly scheduled class. He can simply use the virtual technology his college supplies, to fulfill his teaching obligations.
After experiencing an unsuccessful "class," he wrote a lengthy diatribe about how virtual technology will never replace face-to-face teaching. Here are some things he failed to consider (and, quite frankly, most people who are new to virtual technology or use it occasionally, also fail to consider):
1. Choose the right technology for the job and be sure you know how to use it. We recently received a directive from a client telling us to not use the highlighter tool to highlight text on the slide because "it doesn't work, it scribbles all over the slide." In fact, the "breakdown" was with the Bamboo tablet in our office.
2. You cannot decide, on the spur of the moment, that you will teach using virtual technology. A delivery of this type must be planned for (see next article). The writer bemoans: Tonight was going to involve role playing, discussions, presentations, and even interactive trivia.
3. If you have a limiting belief that you can only "lecture" while using virtual teaching platforms, and that cannot be as successful as you would have been in the classroom - you will be correct. His sentiments exactly: Tonight I am subjecting my students to this hollowed-out lesson. I do so out of necessity. I know it is not the best experience for my students, or for myself..
The server and the virtual platform have little to do with one another other than being the "power cord;" would you say that your electric company was horrible if your lamp shorted out? We'd be frustrated too: I am now on my third attempt at uploading the lecture. During the two previous attempts a prompt came up, saying "server failure." The program crashed and nothing was recorded or could be recovered. An hour lecture up in smoke - three times over, but it has nothing to do with the virtual classroom.
Virtual classrooms ARE the training room of the future. We recognize that not everyone will be comfortable there, and that's ok (not everyone is comfortable standing in front of a room speaking, either); but don't blame the technology for a lack of forethought, planning, or skill on the part of the human.
Adobe Connect and Your Virtual Learning Offerings
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I have met people who understand learning and I have met people who know Adobe Connect, but I have never met a person who has both those skills at once. This class was outstanding.
Instructional Designer, Navy Federal Credit Union
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The Most Important Key to Facilitating in the Virtual Classroom
We all know good facilitation skills: ask don't tell; encourage discussion among participants-not just between you and the participants; play devil's advocate to challenge people's thinking, etc., but when we move from the classroom to the virtual classroom we seem to revert immediately to lecture and presentation mode.
If you think straightforward lecture is a snoozer in the classroom, it’s ten times worse in the virtual classroom when the only thing participants have to keep them engaged is the sound of your voice. In order to deliver online classes that are engaging, facilitation skills are more critical than ever.
A common complaint of new online facilitators is that the participants aren't paying attention and are frequently multitasking. That is only true if you are not facilitating. If you are facilitating, your participants would be too involved with the learning process to have the time or the inclination to multitask.
According to Wikipedia, a facilitator is someone who helps a group of people understand their common objectives and assists them in planning to achieve them. Another definition, also from Wikipedia, states that a facilitator is a person who makes it easier for other people to accomplish their objectives by offering advice and assistance. A common theme here is that the facilitator is not the focus of the learning event, the facilitator brings the learning about through the training participants.
The best virtual classroom learning experiences put the dialogue and the learning process firmly in the hands of the participants. If you're bringing people together online in order to simply make a presentation - don't. Record the presentation and let your participants view it on-demand. Bring people together online for the kind of interactive and collaborative outcomes that can only be achieved when we bring people together.
Does Anyone Work “In the Office” Anymore?
The term "telecommuting" seems like such a quaint, 1990s anachronism, but the fact is worker mobility is playing an ever-increasing role in where and when people work. Today's workforce is more mobile and wired than ever before. How millennials commute to work is becoming less of an issue than where they decide to live.
A [US] Federal Highway Administration report noted that as of 2010, 26 percent of millennials - that's more than a quarter of our [workers] who fall into the age range of 17 to 32 - don't have a driver's license. It's also somewhat of a wakeup call that a Deloitte study notes that 46 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds would choose Internet access over owning a car.
Time for us to rethink: Who we are hiring, where they will work, and how will they be trained? Things that make you go: hmmmmm. No?
Note: This article based on a column by Rick Bell, Workforce Managing Editor.
Training for the Taking
It's odd, really, for an instructional design firm, we are all-for not reinventing the wheel. If there is training already "out there" and it fufills your need - even if you need to augment it a bit - why not take advantage of someone else's hard (and brilliant) work?
Here are some websites we've sourced recently, where you can find training offerings from A (Audacity) to Z (Zbrush).
Educator.com - From physics to music theory, Educator bills itself as having the most comprehensive math and science content on the web. Pay monthly or annually for discount.
Edudemic.com - Lots of free resources and links to free resources. Geared toward teachers but their ideas and findings are really universal to anyone trying to be the best educator they can be.
Lynda.com - A video-based, on-demand, portal for software and business skills. Pay monthly or annually for discount. Free trial.
KhanAcademy.org - Their tag line says it all, "Learn almost anything for free." The topics are more academically inclined and so would be ideal for assisting your workers with basic skills such as mathematics or sciences. Also video based in a really engaging delivery format.
And for some interesting factoids that you can use as icebreakers, energizers or to amuse, check out the Smithsonian's new website: www.SeriouslyAmazing.com.
Tips for online learning
A recent Edudemic article titled 20+ Tips from the Most Effective Online Teachers provides a wealth of good information, not only for those who are teaching online, but also for those organizations that are considering offering courses online. For all the business factors that make distance learning or virtual learning a plus - there are some weighty considerations as well.
We highly recommend reading the full article - it will really give you something to think about. If you don't have time - here are a few of the things we consider to be "gems" in the article:
What the students can teach each other is just as important as what the instructor teaches
Online does not mean easy
Online courses take much more time to develop and facilitate than classroom courses
Being an online educator is more a life style than an occupation
Be proactive about course management
What you can learn about eLearning - from Engineers
Since 1980, The Society for Manufacturing Engineers – Education Foundation, has awarded over $31 million in grants, scholarships, and awards to high schoolers pursuing a degree in science, technology, engineering and math, more than any other professional engineering society.
Their website is a marvel of interactivity and engagement. It’s a wonderful model for e-learning as the ‘learner’ can pursue multiple topics and to multiple-depths, through their own decision making process. www.manufacturingiscool.com
Does Size Matter?
Very often, when organizations move to virtual training, they think that the constraints of travel and space (learning space) are removed and it is now possible for a larger audience to take part in the training offering.
Not true! Compare these two simple visuals:
A circular table of 8 where everyone can see each other, hear each other and be involved with one another in an engaging and collaborative way.
A town-hall meeting in which a lot of people are in attendance, but only a few get to take the floor.
If YOU wanted your opinion heard, or you wanted to come away from the meeting having developed a relationship with the others in attendance, which meeting would you want to attend?
The circular table of 8 is the visual we need to keep in mind when designing for virtual delivery of training. Our learners are already hobbled by the fact that they cannot make eye contact with one another or read one another’s body language; but they CAN make connections with each other when there is a smaller group involved.
The real benefit of virtual delivery is that you can deliver the same topic as many times as you like, at any time that you like. So you can run 3 sessions, of 8 learners, in one week. This allows for more interaction and engagement among the learners. When the facilitator asks a question, it is quite obvious if 8 people have answered or 3 people have answered. When you poll them for their opinion, there is actually time to hear why people chose the answer they did – and allow for comparing and contrasting results.
With larger groups, we might undertake the same activities, but they will simply be ‘watched’ by some in attendance – it is not possible to involve everyone, in every activity, to the degree that they feel they are contributing to the content.
Smaller groups enhance learning outcomes, and virtual learning deliveries allow us to economically utilize smaller groups.
Where e-Learning went wrong (and how to fix it)
Tom Graunke, Founder and CEO, StormWindI From Training Magazine's Inside Training e-newsletter
I helped create e-Learning 1.0 and am here to tell you it has been a complete and miserable failure. This is a bold statement, I realize, so let me explain. At the time, it was edgy and innovative, this idea of using online resources to provide training to vast numbers of people spread out globally. The objective of e-Learning 1.0 was to replace classroom training that required travel with a more cost-effective worldwide deployable methodology. The promise was better learning retention.
We achieved the objective pretty easily but at a steep downside.