How to deliver an awesome training live-virtually?
COVID-19 radically changed our business. I love training and I love to be in the classroom with my students, the interaction, the ah-ha moments, it’s what gives me energy and sharing knowledge is such an amazing thing to be part of. It all broke down early 2020 when we all had to “work-from-home”, but how do you deliver a high impact training with higher scores and passing rates that in-person? Here is what I learned in the last 6 months.
Wait a minute! I’m not a trainer but a Product Manager you may think. In that case this will may help you to deliver the best Sprint Review, Roadmap session, Board Review as possible without being their in-person.
Before we start
Most of the stuff below isn’t my invention, I just curriated it. The brilliant minds at the Scrum.org PST Community and Xebia were my primary source and a few others. What I did was test it. I ran dozens of trainings and workshops over the last 6 months and here is what worked for me.
I’ll break down the story in what you can do to be prepared, what you can do to prepare your students and what you can do during the training.
Things you need to look into before the training
Tools for streaming
So people need to see you, and hear you. The latter is actually more important than the first. You can invest in a serious camera, but if you are sharing a poor wifi connection with your kids who are alternating between Fortnite and Netflix you may not want to go for a 4k DSLR.
After some experiments I tried using my iPhone on a simple camera stand. This allowed my to control the “zoom” by moving the tripod and create a good view on my flip-chart, if I needed to use paper to explain a concept.
The main tool however was the built in camera of the MacBook which just does the job fine, if… you see to proper lighting. Installing a couple of spotlights in your room makes a great difference in your visabilty. Avoid backlighting your face (indirect light works best) and strive for consistency throughout the day. Aka, be careful with using sunlight as your only light-source.
The audio of the MacBook is barely enough, especially the microphone should only be used in emergencies. As an amateur musician I had a PreSonus amplifier and some microphones lying around, but it was too cumbersome. The best thing were my Airpods. Seriously, these things make you mobile, have little background noise and a great microphone. I just ended up using these all the time.
Equally important is a sort of isolated room. Depending on your home situation you may have to make some agreements before your students experience shouting matches between your offspring. (your mileage may vary) I ended up claiming the guest room and turned into a small office over the time.
At the height of my experiments I had installed the equivalent of a NASA control room, surrounded by 3 large monitors and using an iPad as fourth. It allowed me to keep track of the students, present, look ahead in the material, track back channels etc. etc. It proved a little too much. I do recommend dual monitors though. It allows you to do your training and keep the students visible at all times on the second screen
Tools for communicating
I’ve experimented with a lot of tools. Skype, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Miro and Zoom. Zoom was the clear winner. In terms of reliability, scalability and most of all the ability to create breakout rooms makes Zoom in my opinion a great tool.
But what if students are not allowed to use zoom by their company? We’ve heard from some participants that they weren’t allowed to use Zoom by their company for security reasons. If this is the case we advice them to ask their company for an exception and alternatively, they can use a personal device (e.g. personal computer, iPad or iPhone) to join the Zoom session.
We also point out that our Live Virtual Classes are well protected with Zoom, as we’re using password protected, unique Zoom sessions. We can ‘close’ the session when all participants are in, which won’t allow other people to join. With these measures (unique session IDs, password protection and participant-entry block), we can prevent uninvited people from entering the session. It might also be worthwhile to point out that we won’t be discussing company-sensitive information in our classes.
Zoom provides both public and private chat options which are great but if you run a multi-day workshop you may be better off using a Slack channel as this will preserve the history between the sessions. It can also function as a backup channel, incase e.g. Zoom explodes, you can still touch base with your students. Adding a chat is highly recommended as it is a great way to kickstart conversations.
I’ve dabbled with recordings especially since my university attending friends raved about the fact that they could now pause a lecture and go back to capture the essence, but data showed that no-one was accessing the recordings and privacy wise it is too much hassle for the off chance that someone may need it. They can always contact me if they want to anyway. If you decide to record: tell your students and ask for permission.
Tools for presenting
Powerpoint works as good as it does in class. The slides need little adaption to function in a remote setting and you get the benefit of seeing your speaker notes. In a physical setting however, I rarely use Powerpoint. I rely on on flip-charts and interaction to create an interactive learning experience rather than a forced path through slides. Imagine my dillema ;-)
I worked with a physical whiteboard and moved a second camera closer to it. This means typically working with two cameras. It kept me on my feet and mirrored the classroom experience better, or so I thought. The training is not about me, nor about how I feel most energised, it is about the students and how well they can absorb and co-create the knowledge.
So I started working with Procreate for iPad and use it as a canvas to draw on. You may need to mirror it depending on your setup, you can also share directly from your ipad. Robbin Schuurman created these awesome templates, that we would build up together with the students.
This proved to be a good solution, but it in itself is not enough if you want to foster collaboration, you need the equivalent of the whiteboard experience.
Tools for collaborating
One tool that offers you a web based white board is WebWhiteBoard. (https://www.webwhiteboard.com) It has a nice integration with Google Hangouts, recently they got acquired by Miro, but it was a nice low-tech-feeling example that had a very low barrier to entry for students.
Google Docs may sound like a less logical choice but it is really powerful in collaboration. E.g. Google Sheets or Slides provide a canvas that one can fill together. I found it not that intuitive apart from collaborative fill in exercises if you pre-create the documents.
Many of the games we play in the trainings are variants of card sorting. Trello is a great tool for creating virtual backlogs, roles and responsibility games or for example delegation poker.
Too many tools will ultimately confuse your students so I ended up with two main instruments, the most frequently used being Miro.com (Yeah I know of Mural, but I prefer Miro)
It’s basically a huge canvas to play with, you can use preformed shapes but also free format drawing and it smooths out some of your shapes. You can drop your slides or other learning formats (e.g. the procreate sheets from above) on the canvas and students can leave their comments right on the drawings. It also has an export function that allows students to get a PDF of their training without any difficulty.
So in terms of collaborating and creating Miro is my main tool but sometimes I want a little more control. This is where Menti-meter comes in. It is great for ask-me-anything sessions or if you want more closed questions to guide your audience. I’ve used it to facilitate community meetings to collaboratively build a backlog of topics that we want to address and other interactions.
I found that in a non-physical training the mind of the participant wanders off even quicker that normal when they are not participating. You need an interactive element roughly every 5 minutes. Menti is a great way to make sure this happens in a different way.
Tips in your preparation
You may experience connectivity issues during the class. How students should deal with network issues should be communicated before the class begins. This is where backup channels come in.
In practice I have only experienced some stutter once when I had forgotten to make agreements with the rest of the family over bandwidth usage. There are technical ways to make sure this never happens, or there is this magical process that it called “talking to each other.”
Another thing is: create detailed steps how accounts need to be created and what tools you will need. Create those in advance and share the details so that they do not loose time. It can take up to 30 minutes to get everyone lined up, make sure they are prepared, or make sure you have the time.
Explain students the value of virtual hand raising or for those moments when the technology is not working well use a visual clue. Use some visual cards to allow some non-audio feedback loops. I point students to https://www.seethinkdo.it/meeting-cards/ so they are prepared.
Pre-record part of the presentation, this tends to create a snappier experience and gives you time to breathe and read the chats. Also you can now spread out the experience over more days, use the recordings as homework blocks of 5–25 minutes.
Now, don’t go overboard and create a youtube playlist, it is a learning experience. For our PSPO-A you will get several assignments from “Dave”, your CEO those became fun little role-played videos that added to the training rather than replaced it.
Set some rules for your participants: like everyone keeps cameras on all the time. Everyone keeps mics on mute unless they’re speaking. Don’t start with “can you hear me?” Assume people can hear you, and rely on your instructor to let you know if there’s a problem.
Get everyone comfortable with the chat function that you’ll be using. Do something in the chat within the first 10 minutes of your first session. (We asked everyone to type in their location and time zone.)
Things you need to be aware of during the training
Finally, learn from my mistakes: provide way more context for the exercise than you would normally do. Once they are in the breakout rooms they need to know what to do, so ask explicitly if everyone understands it.
If the excerise is to be done in Miro; tell them, show them and check if they are all there. Students don’t want to feel dumb so make sure they have a safe place to say if they haven’t figured out how to edit something or move something on the virtual canvas.
Time management is more critical then ever! We ended with a typical training day looking something like 3x 50 minutes of training, 1 hour for lunch and again 3x 50 minutes of training. The 10 minutes are for bio breakes, getting coffee and checking if the kids haven’t burned the house down.
What worked well, was creating a raster and taping it above my monitor so I would always be aware of the time left, playing with the flow and keeping a tight cadance. Eight hours of screen time for consecutive days is something that less than 10% of the students desire. (thank you Alex Ballarín for running a survey on that)
When you make breakout groups in Zoom, snapshot the layout. Every now and then you re-arrange the rooms, or someone drops out the class and comes back, or it is the second day, either way its lame if you want to recreate the rooms and have to ask: “So, eh Peter you were in the same room as Mary right?” Give your students the feeling that you are in control.
Charge airpods between sessions. Use the 10 minute break to give them some extra juice, or experience the slow and agonising death of audio right when you are in the middle of explaining an interesting concept.
An awesome training is about creating the space where your students can be awesome, spot their interaction, the questions they don’t ask, drop in the breakout rooms to observe their collaboration, shuffle if the chemistry is off, have fun and make sure they have fun.
I’m pretty sure that the Live Virtual Classes won’t go away and will come to co-exist with the in-person classes. So either way if you’d like to participate in one of our classes, check out our Xebia Academy page for more information or inquire for an in-house class via training@xebia.com.
