Archive for how to train online
Biggest Mistake to Avoid Going Online with your Class
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Are you making this mistake training online?
You’ve created a course that you present in the classroom. You’re entertaining, you get interaction, and you encourage lots of discussion. Good. So, what’s the problem? That teaching style doesn’t translate well to the online environment. Structuring and presenting an online course is different than designing a ‘live’ course. Here is a fatal mistake presenters make when attempting to adapt their classroom course to an online platform.
Mistake: Talking Through the Hour
In the classroom, you have live bodies (including yours) to energize and exchange ideas. You probably love to hold discussions—and there are some lively ones in your class. It doesn’t bother you that the discussion gets off-topic because it’s interesting.
The online presentation is different. You don’t have those bodies to energize and be energized. You don’t have time to get off topic. You don’t have the audience there for discussion. So, how do you interact with your audience and keep them engaged (especially challenging with a real estate audience)?
Solution: Change the way you present to utilize the audience interaction tools available in your online platform. That means you must be able to ‘flex’ your teaching methods to adapt to the online environment.
There are at least 7 ways you can create meaningful audience interaction while teaching online. These include:
- Chats
- Whiteboard
- Questions
- Polls
- Surveys
- Small groups
- Rewards
Experts say you should get audience interaction about every 5-7 minutes. That means you’ll have to ‘choreograph’ your presentation much differently than you do when you’re live.
How much interaction are you adding to your presentation or course?
Why your Online Pacing is Putting Them to Sleep–3 Tips
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Here’s why online presentations are not very effective–and three simple tips you can use when you’re in charge of presenting online. These tips are for you, whether you teach courses or do online listing and buyers’ presentations.
It Doesn’t Work to Use the Same Delivery You Used in the Classroom
When we’re ‘live’, we can get away with some dawdling. We can converse and joke with our attendees, and that provides attention and focus in the room. However,
Problem One: The Class is Too Long
In the state where I live, the shortest clock-hour approved course we do is three hours. I just talked to a friend of mine who was doing a 4-clock hour course–on Zoom! My gosh, that’s an eternity. Afterwards, he told me he was exhausted. I’ll bet. I wonder how attentive the students were? You can be the best presenter in the world, but you can’t hold people’s attention online for 4 hours!
Solution: Cut your larger class into 45-minute segments. Yes, you can take the last few minutes for clean-up and questions.
Problem Two: The slides are boring or there aren’t enough slides
Well, worse than that: You may not have ANY slides. Yes, you may be able to get away with that when you’re ‘live’. But, when you go online, you have to work much harder to keep their attention. Here are the rules for slides:
- Use 40-55 in a 45-minute session
- Keep a slide up for no more than 1-11/2 minutes
- Make your slides interesting and provocative; you’ll need to spend some money, perhaps, by having your slides professionally done. I’ve been getting my slides done by Fiverr. You can go online and see various PowerPoint specialists’ work.
- Keep your slides simple–no more than 6 words per line and 6 lines. Use at least 36-point font.
Problem Three: The Presenter’s Delivery is Too Slow.
Think of it this way. Every minute, your attendee is trying to think of a way to escape that screen and go somewhere else (eat, another website, dealing with the kids, etc.). How do you combat this? Your delivery must be different from that you use in class.
- Speak faster
- Use more inflections
- Don’t allow ‘dead’ space (use music, video, other presenters to provide sound variety)
Simple Solutions Deliver Great Results
Using these three tips, you’ll assure that your online class or presentation captures and keeps your audience’s focus.
Take Your Course Online with Confidence
If you’ve sat through those boring online presentations, you know there’s lots of work we instructors need to do to improve our game online. I’m creating Mastermind groups to tackle this question. We’ll work in small groups to translate your ‘live’ classroom course to a dynamic, vibrant, effective online format. Email me at carla@carlacross.com or call me for more information: 425-392-6914. I’ll help you slay the dragon and become a master at online presentations!
Presenting Online: One Great Way to Keep Audience Attention
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Presenting online? Here’s a great way to keep audience attention.
Do you present or teach courses? You probably have done most of your teaching ‘live’–in the classroom. Though sometimes it’s hard to keep your attendees’ attention in the classroom, it’s much harder when you’re online.
Going from ‘Live’ to Online
Recently, I did a webinar on how to take your classroom online. In the pre-webinar survey, I asked attendees their biggest concerns. About 70% of the concerns were
how to hold the audience’s attention online.
No wonder.
One Great Method to Re-Focus Your Audience’s Attention
Think back through a ‘live’ course you taught recently. Remember a question you asked to launch a discussion? How could you get your audience’s attention and interest online with that question? Use the question as a poll.
How to Insert a Poll
Polls are a great way to gather information about your audience and use that information as a ‘bridge’ from one section of your course to another. It’s also a good way to capture an audience’s attention toward the beginning of the online session.
Where to place your poll:
At the beginning. You can start your course with a poll that will let you and your audience know important facts or opinions about your subject.
As a bridge between sections of your course. Think of a section of your course where you could gather information. For example, when I’m doing the webinar I’ve mentioned here, I ask attendees the amount of time they can concentrate online. Then, I use those poll results to start the section on ‘how to hold attendees’ attention online’.
Important: Be sure to relate the poll results to the topic you’re exploring.
How Many Polls?
In a 45-minute webinar, you’ll want to use 3-5 polls. Don’t overuse polls, however. They are becoming so popular that they’re in danger of being used too often. When that happens, people won’t respond.
Tip when using a poll: Write the poll question on a slide, so attendees can see the poll question before it comes up in the webinar. Or, if you aren’t using a ‘poll’ feature, you can write the poll in the chat box, and have your attendees answer in the chat box. Caveat: You can get overwhelmed with answers if you have lots of attendees!!!!
Other Attendee-Involving Strategies
You’ll also want to use other attendee-involving strategies like
- Questions
- Chat
- Games
- Small groups
- Activity plan
Translating your Classroom to Online Success Takes Some Work
By answering my questions above concerning your course, you can prepare that course for online ‘translation’. You’ll gain audience participation, audience accountability, and great feedback on your course.
Is Your Online Course as Spectacular as You can Make It?
If you’ve sat through those boring online presentations, you know there’s lots of work we instructors need to do to improve our game online. I’m creating Mastermind groups to tackle this question. We’ll work in small groups to translate your ‘live’ classroom course to a dynamic, vibrant, effective online format. Email me at carla@carlacross.com or call me for more information: 425-392-6914. I’ll help you slay the dragon and become a master at online presentations!
Online Training: One Method to Keep Their Attention and Increase ‘Take Home Value’
Posted by: | CommentsDo you do online training? If you’re like most of us, the bulk of our training was done in the ‘live’ classroom. Not so today. And, the prediction is that we’ll continue to do much more training online–forever.
Some Of Our Greatest Concerns When we Go Online
In the webinars I’ve been doing, I asked the audience for topics for me to address.
And, no wonder. In the classroom, we can talk through three hours, and, if we’re entertaining and we engage the audience, we can get away with that one method of delivering our message. (I say ‘get away’ because we need to learn and use more than one or two training methods!). It’s not so easy when we’re training online! Just talking through the time frame won’t hold our audience’s attention, or get participation.How to Solve the Problem
As instructors have found, you can’t just turn on the camera and talk! So, how do you use various methods to engage your audience and increase learning? First, you must decide where and how you want participation. Then, you include those methods in your online course. Below, you’ll see an invitation to join me for a Masterminds series where we’ll ‘translate’ your classroom course to an effective online presentation or series.
Several Methods to Engage your Audience in Online Courses
Below, I’m inviting you to see my recorded webinar on how to take your class online. You’ll see several methods to engage your audience, and I’ll demonstrate several to you. Count the number of times I asked the audience to engage (you’ll find 11 or 12 in an hour session!).
Great Audience Engagement Tool: Use a Handout with Work to be Done
In the webinar I mentioned, I created a handout for each participant with questions for them to answer as they proceeded in the webinar. I addressed a topic, and then provided some ‘time out’ for participants to decide how they could use that idea in their own course. By the time they finished the webinar, they had filled out a page of ideas on how to ‘translate’ that ‘live’ course to an online platform. Use this handout as you go through the webinar to ‘translate’ your course as you go. You’ll end the hour with several ideas ready to put to work as you re-create your course online.
Question: What work or handout could you provide to use as you introduced topics in your webinar? How could you involve students in completing the questions? What could you do with your course handout in subsequent series? How could you use it in forums or small groups to engage your students?
In my next few blogs, we’ll investigate more ways to hold attendees’ attention and increase learning.
Want to watch the video of my webinar Masterclass: How to Take your Classroom Online? Go to www.carlacross.com, and press the Webinars and More Button. You’ll see the post with the video and the handouts available for you.
How I can help you go online with confidence:
Join us and then launch your online course with confidence!