If you’re wondering how to prepare and deliver online training, we’ve put together six top tips for you. They’re based on our experience delivering live online training to hundreds of people over the past 18 months:
- Decide a format – Teams or Zoom?
- Communicate – let participants know what’s in store for them, and send reminders
- Keep participant numbers tight
- Keep sessions short and punchy – you can cover a lot in two hours
- Cameras on – because it’s more difficult to engage people you can’t see
- Go beyond flat PowerPoint… if your format will allow it
If you’re used to training people face-to-face, you’ll need to make a few adjustments to make the transition to live online training. Here are our top tips:
Decide a format – Teams or Zoom
Our flat-out recommendation is Zoom. It’s easy for trainers to log in from separate locations, hand over control to one another and take individuals or small groups into breakout rooms. It seems to take up far less bandwidth than Teams, so it’s much easier to show movies and bring in interactive elements of training via screen share. Communication with participants is easy too. Of course, most of your training is likely to be spoken. But it’s handy to be able to use the text chat function with individuals – and for them to be able to message you without fellow participants seeing that they have to pop out to answer the door, or they’re not quite keeping up.
BUT, and it’s a big but, if you’re training corporate organisations, Zoom is very unlikely to be on their white list of accepted apps. And anyway, the people you’re going to be training are used to using Teams and probably won’t want to switch for a training session. But, in our experience, Teams is a pig. It will make your computer’s fan whirr like it’s going to take off. Meetings can be patchy – with delay for some participants and freezing for others. And if you’re a small organisation like Wordtree – with several clients on Teams – the experience of nipping between one client account and another can be laborious.
So give yourself plenty of time to get out of the Teams environment where you last joined a client’s meeting. Because the last thing you want before a training session is the stress of having to re-load the Teams app so that you can get back into your own company’s Teams environment. Basically, Teams is set up for use within one big work environment. It does not like – and was not built for – peripatetic users.
The other thing to do before you deliver training on Teams is shut down absolutely every other app on your computer. Otherwise your computer fan will go into overdrive and you might find it difficult to move between slides or share visual aids.
Communicate – let participants know what’s in store
Communication is important in the run-up to any training. But when it’s online and people may not be moving from their desks to take part, it’s even easier for people to forget to attend. Or arrive late because their previous meeting overran… or decide that the first 10 minutes is a good time to pop to the loo and get a cup of tea.
So send an initial invitation outlining what will be happening, what absolute timelines are – and what, if anything, participants will need to bring along. Then send at least two short reminders, asking people to be there five minutes ahead of time for a hard start.
Keep participant numbers tight
This may seem counter-intuitive, but you’ll probably want to invite fewer people to an online training session than you would to a face-to-face equivalent. In a regular Wordtree face-to-face training session for copywriting, tone of voice, messaging or something similar, we like to have no more than 12 participants. In an online session, we feel the optimal number is eight.
This is partly down to technology – particularly with Teams. Include more than ten people in a Teams meeting (eight participants plus two trainers) and the technology begins to perform less well. People can’t hear. There is freezing and delay. Very, very much not ideal.
But it’s also down to giving people the attention they need. In face-to-face training, there’s a lot more opportunity to sense when someone needs help. You can see it in their posture, or the way they’re staring at a screen. Online, it’s harder. If participants are joining from noisy office environments, they might have to switch their mike off – so they can’t just jump in seamlessly with questions. You might also think someone has finished an exercise, because they’re staring at the screen. But what’s really happening is that they’re just reading.
With smaller groups, it’s easy to keep everyone included and to keep giving people the support they need for your training to have an impact.
Keep sessions short and punchy – you can cover a lot in two hours
Our face-to-face training sessions and workshops often happen in day-long or half-day chunks. We vary the pace. We get people to move around. We lay on nice lunches. All-in-all, it’s a pleasant, sociable and energising occasion.
Online training, however, is a completely different kettle of fish. A whole day working intensely at a screen isn’t going energise anyone. So if a client needs a full day’s worth of training, we break it down into separate two-hour-long sessions. We keep the pace going. We keep people engaged… and participants are generally surprised when two hours has gone by. We don’t think it would be the same if we pushed these sessions to three hours – or even two and a half. So our advice is, structure well – and you’ll be able to pack a lot into two hours.
Cameras on – because it’s difficult to engage people you can’t see
When you’re creating a scope for the training, our advice would be to stipulate that people keep their cameras on. If they’re working from home and don’t have a camera, ask the organisation you’re working with to provide them. A USB camera from Amazon can cost less than a tenner.
Also, check that people are going to have sufficient bandwidth to join from home. If they’re not, ask them if they can go into the office for the training.
We’ve had a couple of experiences of running a training session where we were the only people whose cameras were on. It’s weird. You’re hoping people are taking part and following along. You ask questions of individuals, and sometimes they answer, sometimes they don’t. Basically, cameras off is far from ideal.
Go beyond flat PowerPoint… if your format will allow it
When you’re training face-to-face, you can control the learning environment more. You can ask people to switch their phones off. You can close the door and cut out any distracting noise. Online, you can’t do this. People’s kids are going to be running around in the background. Their cats are going to wander across their laptops. And they’re going to hit mute and answer their phone while you’re mid-flow.
There’s a certain charm to all of this (particularly meeting people’s cats). But if you can’t stop distraction entering the training environment, you have to make the training materials as super-engaging as possible.
Movies, animation, games… all of it needs to come out to play.
Except, of course, if you have to use Teams. In which case, even PowerPoint will overload the experience… so covert your training material to a PDF, flick through the slides and be your sunniest, most charismatic self.
If you have any tips or tricks to make online training even more exciting, please do share. And if you’d like to find out more about our approach to training, check out our FAQs.