What I learned from running a remote training on visual thinking via Zoom using a document camera

Learn about my practical insights after hosting a training session in visual thinking with the use of Zoom as a conferencing platform and a document camera.

These learnings apply to any other situation where you would like to deliver training online. There are certain specifics related to demonstrating techniques, other than that the observations are quite generic.

Recently there has been some serious hype around Zoom vulnerability, but hopefully, this issue will be resolved by the time my article is ready for publishing. And in any case, my learnings and experience will not alter, no matter the outcome.

The why and the journey

I train on visual thinking. I have been training people to use visual thinking to become better professionals in their primary field since 2015. I have delivered more than 40 training sessions and taught more than 450 people (at the time of the article was written). And training is not my primary job — I work as an agile coach and a product owner. Visual thinking is my passion, and I learn much more myself when I share my knowledge and experience with others.

Up until summer 2019, I have been delivering the training in person, being physically present in a room with the students, providing my explanations and demonstrations hand-drawn on flipcharts.

The tipping point

Something happened in May 2019. I have participated in the training by Jeff Patton and Jeff Gothelf on ‘Smart Product Ownership.’ (It is the best course on product ownership you can find, and I recommend it. But that is a topic for a separate post). And I was blown away by Jeff Patton’s style — he did not use any slides, and instead, he drew all of his explanation on A4, broadcasted on a big screen with the use of a document camera, showing all of his moves in great detail:

The photo was taken during the training by two Jeffs. You can see Jeff Patton’s scribbles projected on a large screen behind them. This is the way he explains the material, by drawing and writing everything down, as he goes. I loved it!

Not that I did not know about document camera before, Eva-Lotta Lamm had told me about her using it for her workshops earlier in 2018, but somehow I did not react to that back then. By the way, you should watch this great video where Eva-Lotta shows some neat sketchnoting tricks demonstrated with a document camera:

Eva-Lotta Lamm’s 1-hour presentation on how you could improve your sketchnoting during a Frontend conference in Zurich back in September 2016. See how she works with the document camera here.

From flipcharts to the document camera

And as I said, the two Jeffs training became a tipping point for me. I decided to invest in this type of equipment and bought one for myself. I have purchased this one:

Epson DC-21 Document Camera. The photo was taken from Epson web site.

My intention was to start using the document camera to demonstrate techniques drawn on a smaller format, so that that it is more comfortable for me (I would not need to stand next to a flipchart stand while providing demonstrations) but the same time it is more convenient for students too — provided the room has the capability of showing the video feed on a large screen that gives a better view for every participant compared to what they can see on a flipchart. I have play-tested the new approach for a group in Vilnius early June 2019:

The room set up for the visual thinking full-day class for the fantastic people of Agile Coach Lithuania in Vilnius, June 1, 2019. You can see that the document camera is mounted on a small table at which I was seated. The video feed is projected on the large screen behind my back. And I still use a flipchart stand for some specific demonstration. But the heavy lifting of the training is done through the document camera from now on. This is the historical moment.

The Agile Coach Lithuania group responded very positively to the experiment and many of them told me that the document camera demonstration was the biggest wow element to the training for them.

I realized that switching from flipcharts to a document camera had a lot in store for me. There was a high potential for running remote sessions, something that was never an option for me before — the specifics of visual thinking training imply that you demonstrate all the techniques so that participants can follow you. There must be a strong connection between you and the class participants.

Why a document camera, why not just going fully digital?

One could argue that you could go with the digital means — tablets with stylus-pencils that can be connected to a conferencing and thus be used for demonstrations. But for me there is a considerable downside to this method — people cannot see your hands. They can only see a line magically appearing on white space, and it is difficult to follow, hard to relate. And after all, I am more of an analogous person, I prefer to draw on a real paper. That is my preference. But I do not reject the digital approach at all! I use it for a different purpose. I use a big iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil to create digital illustrations, for example; for instance, in this article.

Early pilots of fully remote sessions

After the successful test run of the document camera for the on-site training, I was convinced that it was possible to mount a completely remote session. At least I felt the need to give it a try. The opportunity to do so arrived later in June and then another one early in July when I held fully remote 4-hour sessions for my colleagues in the company where I work as an agile coach. In both sessions, I connected the document camera to the corporate telepresence equipment.

Here is the Linkedin post of one of the participants sharing her experience from the workshop:

Giedre Grusiene on LinkedIn: “Yesterday we had an opportunity to learn some new skills. Visual…

For some weird reason, I did not learn as much from these two sessions as I would from the third session I would run using Zoom. And the full story goes below.

My learnings from running a fully remote session via Zoom

The setup

This is the setup used for the training session I am describing in this article.

The following elements comprised the setup for the remote training, from the trainer’s end:

1. MacBook Pro 15'’ — to host the conference.
2. Zoom — the conferencing solution, Pro plan.
3. Epson DC-21 document camera — to feed the video streaming of my demonstration of visual thinking techniques.
4. Jabra Speak 710 ‘turtle’ — for the better sound and microphone experience.
5. Belkin USB-C to USB mini-hub — these new MacBooks do not have USB ports and I needed two — one to connect the document camera and another one — for the Jabra ‘turtle’.
6. iPhone 8 connected to the Zoom session from a separate account — to provide the video feed of the trainer — the document camera is used as the main webcam for the Zoom session, and I needed an extra video feed for the people to see my face.
   UPDATE: Later I learned that when you choose to Share, there is the ‘Advanced’ tab and there you can choose to share your document camera in addition to the web-camera you are already using, for example on your laptop. Today I do not use my smartphone anymore and I just use the built-in camera on my laptop to show myself along with what my document camera is broadcasting.
7. Joby tripod to fixate iPhone — you simply need a reliable tripod to position your iPhone for a stable video streaming.
8. Regular A4 copy paper — for the demonstration itself.
9. A lot of various markers, not important for the post but with the majority of them produced by the super quality Neuland brand.

The set-up from the group’s end:

1. Big meeting room capable of seating 15 people around a large circular table.
2. A digital projector and a big white screen on a wall.
3. One laptop to connect to the Zoom session and to send the video feed to the projector.
4. One Jabra speaker-microphone device to provide a better sound experience.
5. A4 paper for the participants to draw.
6. Marker sets for each participant (a technical pen and a couple of brush pens, the minimum set for sketchnoting techniques).

The session was scheduled to last for four full hours, some additional time for setting things up, and for breaks was planned too. The group was 12 people, 11 of them were seated in the same physical location and another one connected to the session remotely, from home.

Insights and learnings

Below you will find my learnings from the session that I carefully collected.

Do the dry-run

A week before the session, we did the dry-run test to see how the connection would work, what was the quality of the projected picture, and so on. This is always a good idea to do as you can identify a few things that are only apparent when dealt with in real life. Things that you cannot guess upfront. In our case I found out that a better quality of sound was needed from the audience side — I asked the organizer to bring in a speaker device with a better microphone, instead of using a built-in laptop microphone. The test also helped us ensure that the quality of the projected picture was good enough.

Dress appropriately and.. fully

This may sound obvious, and still, it is important to remember that working remotely, seated at your desk, you are not static. It is a good idea to get dressed appropriately to your audience and the way you would be dressed if you were physically present in the same room. For example, if you think that you should only look appropriate in your upper part of the body while the lower part could be more relaxed, you are wrong. During my 5 hour session, I had to get up a couple of times, and it wasn’t planned — to fix a few things here and there. And I was ready for that.

Remember Mr. Kelly’s interview back from 2017? He was wearing trousers, but those were jeans, not matching his suit and tie attire. One of the speculated versions about why he did not want to get up to help his wife herd the little ones out of the room.

Quality of light

When you do the session remotely, there is a need for additional attention to the light quality for the room where the group is seated. Unlike a normal training session, where both the trainer and participants are in the same room and therefore are using the same light, in the remote session the participants basically have two needs:

1. They need to have enough light to see what they are drawing.
2. The need to be able to see the projected video feed.

There was a challenge to combine the two experiences in our case. The thing is that we used the digital projector, and normally people would put the lights down a bit to improve the contrast of the picture on the screen. But in this dim light, then it became more difficult to see what people were drawing.

I think that the best option is to have a well-lit room with a big TV screen. This way, there will be no conflict between the light and the contrast of the picture shown to the group.

Quality of the picture

The size of the screen used in the room for the group was not super big. Some participants had issues seeing all of the details demonstrated on it. What happened is that there were two additional laptops connected to the session and a smaller part of the group gathered around the two laptops and watched the demonstrations on-screen. This way, their experience greatly improved. What I learned from that is that for larger groups you either need a much bigger screen in their location so that they can see all the details or maybe a classroom with more smaller screens around it.

Mark up the visible area

I have seen Jeff Patton doing this — placing small pieces of duct tape at the corners of the sheet of paper where he was drawing his explanations. I did the same, and it helped me to fixate the visible area. I had the tendency to move the sheet of paper around, so it was easier for me to draw. And I would then move the drawing outside of the field of view. The markup reminds you to stay in this visible area.

Onsite facilitator

It turned out to be a critical aspect — having a person seated together with the group who helped me with facilitation. Even though I had the video feed of the room with participants, I hardly maintained contact with the group — I did not see faces well, I could not hear all the nuances of their informal feedback and so on. And when you lose the connection with the group, the onsite facilitator helps the group to raise a concern, ask a question and overall provide you with feedback with regards to the session dynamics.

Charge all the critical equipment to full

Before the session begins, all of the devices that have battery must be at their full charge. I had the speaker and the smartphone that had batteries, and they were a critical component of the session set up. I made sure both pieces of equipment had a full charge at the beginning. Nevertheless, I had to keep the smartphone connected to a charger throughout the session.

Have a separate device to broadcast your portrait video

The specifics of Zoom is that it implies to show your face when you are connected to a meeting. I had to broadcast my document camera, and you have to choose one camera at a time. Therefore I had to connect another device to the session that would only show my portrait video so that the participants could see my face throughout the session. And you need to both mute the extra device and turn the sound off on it to avoid echoes.

Quality of sound from the participants was not good enough

Even though the speaker I used did the trick and provided a clear sound so that all I was saying was heard clearly and well on the participants’ end, I had a very bad experience hearing people. They used a similar speaker, and it was not designed to provide good microphone coverage for a large group. Probably we needed more speakers connected or a bigger speaker, more fit for large audiences.

You go faster when you lack contact with a group

As mentioned above, I did not really have the same level of connection with the group I usually have when I do training sessions onsite, physically present. What happens when you do feel the group is that you tend to accelerate. You go faster and then it becomes a problem — people cannot keep up with the pace. Onsite facilitation helps, regular checkups help too. I did the latter and there was a person to help me with the onsite facilitation, luckily for me.

Workout exercise for participants

Drawing is an exhausting exercise, especially for the people who are not doing this regularly. In the second half of the session, I heard complaints from the people that their fingers, necks, and arms were hurting. I was asked to facilitate a workout to relax the hurting muscles. Which we did. Probably, I will publish a separate article suggesting good exercises for an interim workout during such training.

Here are some pictures that were taken by the participants during the session, to give you an idea of how it looked from their perspective.

These observations I shared above conclude the article. I really hope you found it useful and until my next publications! Stay tuned — remember to follow me to get updates on new releases.

I am an agile coach, product owner, and a visual thinker living in Copenhagen, Denmark. I blog on visual thinking and share my random agile thoughts, if you want to read more. You can get in touch with me via my Instagram account or on Twitter. All the best!