Virtual, instructor-led training is here to stay. In the past few months, many instructors and trainers have had to adapt to a virtual environment (it has been a learning experience, to say the least). Trainers who embrace virtual platforms and adapt the best have an advantage over those who don’t. So, I thought it might be a good idea to cover a few Virtual Instructor-Led training best practices. In this session, I’m going to cover a few tools and tips for virtual instructor-led training. In addition, I’ll start with exactly what a “virtual instructor-led” training program is and how it is different from other types of training.
What Is Virtual Instructor-Led Training?
To some of you, this definition may seem pretty obvious. However, there is a little confusion because people use different words and phrases to describe types of various online learning. Here are a few of these types of training along with synonyms that people use to describe them.
- Virtual Instructor-Led Training: These are live sessions that are delivered via a virtual meeting platform like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or GoTo Meeting.
- Online Training: Online training sessions are typically prerecorded sessions that can be accessed on-demand, such as through a learning management system.
- Live Webinars: Webinars can be live and they can also be instructor-led. However, they are typically a one-sided delivery. Most often, when you view a webinar, the audience isn’t really a part of the process. As a result, they are kind of a hybrid between the first two types of virtual learning platforms.
By the way, the tools and tips that I will cover can also work well for online training and webinar training as well. However, the focus here is on interactive learning with a live audience.
Virtual Instructor-Led Training Best Practices
Before you go onto the next step of designing your training session, you have to understand the difference between each type of training. For instance, if a viewer can watch the video replay of your live session and get the same results, you may be missing out on some of the main value of the live session. The key difference is the interaction with the audience. So, if you are delivering a monologue to your live audience, you may want to make a few adjustments.
Make Your Virtual Training Sessions Shorter and More Focused.
If you want an easy way to see your team members roll their eyes, use these words in a meeting. “We are going to do an eight-hour Zoom training session on Monday.” You will likely hear a few groans as well.
One of the major benefits of interactive training is that the live instructor can break up the training into bite-sized pieces. That is a much better way to develop a skill, by the way. Often, with in-person meetings, since it is so costly to get a group together, we want to jam as much content into the session as possible into our development programs. (By the way, that is a terrible way to conduct in-person training as well. But that is beside the point.)
When we are scheduling virtual training, though, that cost to get the group together is removed from the equation. Let me give you an example. Let’s say that a company invests in a new piece of software that will be used in 50 different offices worldwide. If you have to book travel for a minimum of 50 different people, you’d want to make sure that you only had to do it once. However, the odds that each of those people will be an expert at using the software after just a couple of days is unlikely.
With a virtually delivery, though, you could conduct a single hour with an overview of the software. Then, give the remote learners time to experiment with the software. A couple of days later, the group could meet again to cover just a few specific components of the software with an interactive, step-by-step guide. Then, the participants could have some time to master those few components before returning for additional remote training. Since people learn better with active participation, they will learn the process much faster this way.
Include Discussions to Make Sure Your Delivery is Interactive.
One of the other major benefits of a virtual instructor-led training is that a good instructor can make the session interactive. A big mistake that a lot of trainers make is they focus too much on what they will and are saying. While they do this, they disregard the interaction with the group.
For example, let’s say that a man asks a woman out on a date. Then, the man spends the entire dinner talking about himself never allowing his date to say anything. Do you think he will get a second date?
Virtual instructor led training, in a sense, operates in the same way. The more that the virtual facilitator talks in a monologue format, the less the group will like it. I suggest that instructors add discussions throughout their sessions. Some of you may be thinking, “That is easier said than done, though.” To help, I will cover a few tips later to get the group to give you feedback.
For more details about this, visit 9 Reliable Ways to Add Audience Participation to Your Presentation.
Make Sure You Give Tangible Take-Aways to the Participants.
The best training sessions deliver tangible results for participants. Meeting planners often focus on audience satisfaction to determine the value of training. This is a mistake. Well, it is, at least, an improper focus. Yes, we want the audience to enjoy the training. However, if the training doesn’t add value, it is a waste of everyone’s time.
Of course, if you include both, you hit a home run.
One of the things that I like to do is ask myself what result does my audience need to receive from this training? I want to be very clear about the tangible result before I create any content. Then, design the content to make sure the audience receives that result.
For instance, when we created the virtual version of Fearless Presentations ® we were a little hesitant. We had spent a couple of decades building a brand. Folks knew that if they came to a Fearless Presentations ® class, we helped them reduce (or eliminate) nervousness. We had to make sure that if someone attended the virtual class, they also got that result. So, we reduced the number of attendees. In addition, we added more practice time for each participant. So far, this has been an excellent choice, as the results have been fantastic. As an instructor myself, I find that the people who have attended the online classroom are getting even better results. The feedback the participants give us backs this up.
So spend time making sure your participants get a tangible result from your skills training.
Virtual Instructor-Led Training Tools and Tips.
Below are a few tips and best practices for your virtual training sessions. The closer you stick to these guidelines, the better your training sessions will be.
Just as an FYI, though… These are tools and tips for virtual training sessions. If you are organizing a virtual staff meeting or just need to “get your team on the same page,” you only need one tip: Keep the virtual meeting short. Virtual staff meeting should take 15 minutes to 30 minutes — tops. The moment you cross that 30 minute mark, retention and morale both go down exponentially.
With that being said, if you are teaching or training a group over Zoom or Teams, these tips can help you increase retention and morale.
1) Use Breakout Rooms in Your Virtual Meetings.
Zoom was the first platform to create breakout rooms, but many others have followed suit. This is one of the most important tools for great virtual classroom training. After you teach for a while, break the meeting up into smaller groups. Give the groups specific assignments to increase application. For instance, if you are doing safety training and you cover 10 safety tips, have the groups rank the tips by importance. Then, close down the breakout rooms and have a spokesperson for each group explain their list.
If you think about it, all of the tips you are giving to the group are important. However, by getting each group to not only explain the importance of each but also defend why, the content is reinforced. They are telling each other how important the content is, which helps create better knowledge retention.
For instance, when I do leadership development training virtually, I use the breakout rooms to allow the participants to practice the skills. When I cover ways to improve listening skills, I often break the big groups into three-person breakout rooms. Then I have two of the three participants practicing the listen skills that we covered. The third person is an observer who is watching what the other two do. After a short time, I’ll send instructions to the breakout rooms to change roles and have one of the other two people be the observer. Then later, I switch roles one more time.
By the time we finish the exercise, the participants have practiced all three roles of the activity. So, when I close down the breakout room and ask for feedback, I tend to get a lot. The virtual breakout room activity creates a valuable discussion and interactive experience.
2) Ask Open-Ended Questions in Your Instructor-Led Training Sessions.
Get your audience to participate in the meeting by asking open-ended questions. It is best to ask your audience about their opinion. That way, as long as they voice their opinion, they are correct. So, instead of asking a question like, “Do you think the idea that I have presented will work?” change it to an opinion. An alternative is, “What do you think are the pros and cons of this idea?” Or, if you want to make sure they give you the positives, try something like this. “What advantages do you see from this idea?”
The key here is to stay away from yes or no questions. Remember, we are trying to encourage group discussions.
If your group is more shy or introverted (or not participating well,) try using the virtual breakout rooms to improve the group discussion. When you deliver virtual instructor-led training with 30 participants, you may have a tough time getting participants to chime into discussions. Speaking over a Zoom or Teams call can be awkward for many people. In these situations, I have the discussion start in a breakout room. I’ll send the participants to breakout rooms with five to six people in each. Before they go, though, I’ll send a chat with three to five questions to answer. I also ask the group to vote on a team captain.
Then, when I open the rooms, the team captains lead a discussion among just their group. Even the shyest participant is more likely to voice an opinion to a group of four or five people. I give them a time limit and use the breakout room chat to give teams a countdown. Then, when I close the rooms, I ask each captain to give a brief report on what was discussed.
3) Use the Think/Write/Share Technique.
If you are presenting to a fairly stoic crowd, get them to open up using the Think/Write/Share method. This typically works better than the breakout room discussion if your group is smaller.
The process works just like asking the open-ended question alone. However, you will get more people to participate if you give them a chance to write down their ideas. It is easier for someone to read what they wrote than it is to give their opinion off the cuff. (It takes some of the risk out of the process.)
The process has three simple steps.
- Think: Ask the group the open ended question and immediately ask them to just think about the answer.
- Write: Then, after think for a few seconds, have them write down what they thought about..
- Share: Finally, just ask them to share with the group what they wrote down.
Let’s say you are trying to get your team to improve an outdated process. You might say something like, “When you think about this process, what are three of the major time-wasters in what we are currently doing? If you would, write down two or three of the first things that popped into your head when I asked that question.” Then, give the group a few minutes to write down a few things. To start the discussion, just say something like, “Okay, somebody tell me the most important item of the three things you wrote down.”
This technique works like magic to start discussions.
4) Give Lots of Real-Life Examples.
The attention span of people today is very short. In virtual meetings, it is even shorter. However, when you get into a good example or story, the participants take a little mental vacation. They begin to see a mini-movie in their heads. As a result, the meeting becomes more interesting.
For instance, I recently worked with an ex-Secret Service agent who was in charge of President Obama’s protection detail. Once he retired, he began to get requests from groups who wanted him to come speak at their meetings. Most of these meeting requests were for ten to twenty minutes at a time. So, I suggested that he fill the time telling stories about lessons he learned by interacting with some of the world’s most popular leaders.
As soon as I prompted him with that train of thought, his eyes lit up. I asked what memory he just thought about. He then told me about how he was the only other person inside the Oval Office with President Obama and Nelson Mandela when he came to Washington for a visit. Then, he pulled out his phone and showed me a selfie he took of the three of them together.
The mental movie of him describing that moment to me along with the actual photograph created an epic moment that he could share to his new audiences.
Your stories don’t have to be as epic, though. If you are teaching people about how a new piece of software can save time, just tell a story about how time-consuming the process was before we bought the new software.
Your virtual audience will stay with you longer and pay attention to the entire story.
For more details about this, visit The 5 Steps of Storytelling or Improving Your Storytelling with Better Introductions and Conclusions.
5) Design Shorter Sessions and Take a Break Every Hour or So.
The most important virtual instructor-led training tip is to keep it short. The shorter your Zoom training session, the more your audience will love it. If you have a lot of content, take a break every hour or so. It is really easy to do. Just say something like, “We’ve been going about an hour, and we are about halfway. Why don’t we take a quick 10-minute break?” Most people just turn their microphones and cameras off. However, they are still able to see you. So, when you come back on screen, most everyone will turn their cameras back on.
For in-person training sessions, I often start around 8:30 AM and take a lunch break at Noon. After about an hour, we take a ten-minute break. Then, I teach another hour and take another break. With a third one-hour session, the entire morning session lasts three and a half hours before the lunch break. This type of structure seems ideal for in-person meetings.
However, in the early part of the pandemic, I was the first to deliver our presentation class virtually. I tried the same structure for the virtual instructor-led training and had not-so-great results. As the Zoom meeting went longer without a break, more people began to turn their cameras off, etc. It was harder to keep the energy up.
Eventually, we shortened the virtual training sessions to fifty minutes with a ten-minute break. We got better results when we did. So, a virtual training day ends up being three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon.
Even with that shortened virtual meeting time, you’ll likely be exhausted when you finish teaching. Virtual instructor-led training takes way more energy to deliver and more energy to participate in as well.
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