Further to my last post, let me compare the virtual classroom facilitator to the radio DJ. The following TO-Does come to my mind:
Keep talking – You literally do not have dead air on a great radio show. Silence / pause works well in real presentation but not the case for virtual one. Obviously you cannot use your eye contact in the latter case. So, you got to keep talking, even when you are looking for your training note, assigning breakout group or (unfortunately sometimes) fixing your technical problem.
Music – No DJ can talk every second. They use music and songs. In the virtual classroom, this is not so much as an entertainment to the learners, but to keep them engaged even though you cannot speak for a while e.g. fixing the technical problem. They need to know that the show is still on.
Make them do something from time to time – It is very boring for the learners just to listen and look at the power-point. They cannot see you and worse they can get easily distracted by things happened on their end e.g. boss coming, phone ringing. So, I think we should let them do something, say, for every 5 minutes e.g. responding to a poll, drawing on the virtual whiteboard, saying a few words.
Restrict the number of learners – We said interaction is important to keep them engaged. If you have 40 learners, you will spend 40 minutes just to let them introduce themselves for 1 minute each. I do not have the magic number. I need to try more in order to have a reasonably good judgment. But I guess somewhere between 16-20 should be the maximum.
Just some quick thoughts at the moment…. more to come as I experience more.
