How to give effective and engaging virtual training: Analysis of an expert

Virtual teaching is here to stay.

Unfortunately, engaging people in effective training over Zoom or Teams is really hard. As someone who has delivered many training courses both in-person and online, I have found that there are so many distractions competing for your attendees’ attention. I am sure you have all attended countless hours of uninspiring virtual training.

Recently I had the fortune of observing a master teacher from Harvard Business School in action, Mihir Desai. He performed a business finance training course for our commercial organisation over 3 days which was completely virtual.

Here are 5 observations I took from Mihir to help you transform your virtual teaching.

#1 Pre-reading 📖

We are used to receiving learning materials during the lesson but the key to good virtual teaching is engagement. By sending pre-reading to the class ahead of time you can then focus on bringing the material alive through examples, stories and questions.

You will not need to waste time delivering information, but rather delivering understanding.

#2 Call out names 👩

The virtual environment gives us a sense of anonymity

Break this barrier.

Every 2-3 minutes, use an audience member’s name and ask them a question or view. Re-call topics: “When “Name” suggested X….”

Your students will no longer be able to hide and the engagement will increase.

#3 Use Breakouts 👩‍💻

Get the audience to actively participate, this will help them concentrate and avoid distractions.

Use frequent breakout rooms to facilitate smaller discussions and provide a place for everyone to speak. These breakouts should involve problems or tasks. Alternatively, ask them to discuss a topic.

Regroup afterwards and pick some names to share with the group.

#4: Write on screen 🖊

Turn static slides and documents into dynamic presentations.

There are fantastic tools out there today to allow you to interact during a presentation or screen sharing. Mahir did a great job annotating and writing on-screen. This is ideally done with an iPad, but also works with a mouse/keyboard.

By doing this you are also building a custom set of additional notes to share, tailored to the questions of your trainees.

#5: Inject Energy ⚡

Remember that your audience is sitting in front of a computer with the entire world at their fingertips.

Distractions bombarding them from social media, e-mail, text messages.

You must fill the call with energy to compete.

If you are not demonstrating 100% engagement you will not get this back from the audience.

Summary

The tricks to better virtual training

• Pre-reading
• Call out names
• Use Breakouts
• Write on Screen
• Inject Energy

If you find this article interesting then please comment and share.

You can also join my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.