Have you been asked to deliver an online or virtual training for your team or your colleagues since the start of the Coronavirus lockdown? You are not the only one!
This article will give you several suggestions to help you deliver virtual training more effectively. Several of these tips also apply if you need to lead virtual meetings.
Keep everyone’s attention
Attention spans are definitely shorter during virtual training. Therefore you, as the Trainer, need to use several different strategies to keep everyone engaged.
Great techniques to keep your audience engaged during virtual training sessions include the following:
- Asking questions – especially open-ended questions
- Using participant names
- Asking participants to write in the chat box
- Using the interactive digital whiteboard
- Use a physical whiteboard to write on if you have one
Minimise text and use more images
When using slides be sure to not write too much text and use interesting images that attract the audience’s attention. The images should relate to the topic and learning objectives as much as possible.
Ask delegates to stand up and stretch
Rather like a face-to-face training session, delegates can get bored and lose concentration if they are sitting down all day listening to the Trainer speak. It’s therefore important during your virtual sessions to put yourself in the shoes of the audience and ask them to stand up and stretch from time-to-time. This will give their brains a break and moving around will help the blood flow faster in their body, which helps to refocus their attention and engagement level.
Keep sessions shorter
Even if delegates have turned their camera on, it’s still challenging to keep the attention of your delegates in virtual training. With this in mind it’s a good idea to make your workshop shorter than usual face-to-face sessions and make sure to have more breaks. This might include 1-2 short breaks in the morning and 2 or even 3 breaks in the afternoon depending on how long your training lasts.
Try using a quiz or poll
Try using quizzes or polls from websites such as Kahoot.com to make the session more fun and exciting. You might also wish to use a Timer app when asking delegates to do activities and to know help them know when they should return from breaks.
Conclusion
When delivering virtual training it is essential to adapt your style of delivery to keep your audience engaged.
Which of the above techniques are you going to try to use in your future training sessions?
Do you or your team members need to deliver online or virtual training for your clients or colleagues? We offer a range of tailored training courses that can help, from Train the Trainer, Facilitating Virtual Meetings or even Online Presentation Skills.
Alternatively, we can also support your training needs of your learners with our team of highly experienced facilitators – get in contact to find out more!