COURSES
Exceptional Remote Learning Facilitation
Why join this remote training?
Training adults online is different from leading in-the-room learning workshops – and far too often, it’s nowhere near as good. Great in-the-room trainers often seem to become a shadow of their former selves when they try to deliver over joyless, endless video calls.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. You can deliver great training online, avoiding the hassles of travel (with kit!) and real-world venues – while reaching a diverse, global audience.
You don’t have to lose human-to-human connections, to throw away your popular hands-on, experiential activities or downgrade your aspirations for positive change in your participants’ everyday behaviours.
To bring your training back to life, online, you need to understand what’s shifted in the post-covid learning context, and to develop your own skills so that you can continue to support your learners in this new world and reconnect yourself to the joy and satisfaction of work well done.
In this course, you’ll get to grips with that. You’ll learn to deliver the highly-participative courses, workshops and other training events you used to love – remotely, live online.
If the subjects you teach call for lots of interaction and communication; if you want to track and influence the energy of your participants, minute by minute; if your small-group activities need an upgrade for online… then this course is for you.
What do you get?
In two half-days of live online learning, with a little self-paced preparation for each, you’ll experience remote training at its best. We stay far, far away from the traditional talk-over-slides; instead we continually engage our participants so they learn with, and from, each other.
We’ll demonstrate how to create a psychologically safe space online, where participants quickly make real human connections in a stimulating and active environment.
We’ll help you adapt your small-group activities for online – even those activities that involve space, movement and/or manipulating objects (Lego, anyone?).
We’ll teach you effective strategies for modulating a group’s energy and avoiding overload, so that active participation and ongoing engagement ‘just happen’.
By the end of the course you’ll feel confident about the technology for remote training, overcoming its limitations, and exploiting the potential of live online sessions to deliver real personal development for your participants.
The focus of this course is delivering participative, live training, and adapting existing activities. It is less suitable for those seeking to design whole new learning programmes for the online context, or for trainers working only primarily via recorded materials. But you’ll find yourself applying your new knowledge and skills over and over again in the months ahead.
How is it delivered?
Four two-hour modules are usually combined into two half-day workshops. Typically we deliver via Zoom, but other video conference options are possible.
It’s most often a private in-house course, but we are considering running a public edition: please ask to be added to the waitlist.
“The sessions bring together Judy’s remote facilitation experience and her clean language expertise to provide practical and actionable practices for how teams can improve their distributed and dispersed ways of working. I would strongly recommend looking into this to help teams move to the next level – we have already started to implement the improvements with internal teams and our clients.”
“A fantastic array of tips, tools and techniques that will be useful to anyone delivering online training, events or meetings. The participatory style of delivery means everyone has a chance to ask questions and experiment with the tools at your own pace so that you’re well prepared to apply them in your own professional context. Time well spent if you’re in need of fresh ideas and enthusiasm – the antidote to Zoom fatigue!”
Do you want to start training?
You’ll learn to:
- Lead highly-participative live training workshops
- Convince your participants to stop spectating and to actively participate, with their video cameras on
- Choose and use technology to create a seamless experience, managing button-pressing overwhelm and other technology problems
- Skip the ‘tumbleweed moments’ and get participants engaging rapidly with you and with each other
- Package your course content, including activities, so that it works effectively online
- Avoid embarrassing rookie errors.
Module 1: Foundations
- Know how to set up your own online workspace to optimise communication and engagement
- Connect with people remotely through your online presence and impact
- Lead online training workshops that are motivating and participative
- Communicate effectively online using specific questioning and listening techniques
- Influence others to collaborate in creating a collective online space for learning
- Experience a range of activities to keep people motivated and engaged online
Module 2: Structure
- Understand the critical differences between effective in-the-room and online training designs
- Facilitate engagement and collaboration between people, ideas and information online
- Design activity sequences that are highly likely to lead to commitment and positive change
- Recognise and tackle the challenges prevalent in online learning
- Transform in-room training activities into powerful remote elements
Module 3: Production / Tech hosting
- Manage the technical aspects of hosting workshops
- Mitigate against technology hiccups and failures
- Answer relevant security concerns
- Design engaging activities using whiteboards, sticky notes, annotations, chat, breakout rooms and other third-party tools
Module 4: Facilitation
- Create an atmosphere of inclusivity and psychological safety in your workshops
- Facilitate connections between participants based on trust and cooperation
- Eliminate the tendency of participants to multitask and be distracted when attending online workshops
- Generate an online space for creative divergence, eliminating groupthink and other damaging behaviour
web events that connect:
The HOW-TO GUIDE
The talk-over-slides webinar is profoundly mismatched with the way humans learn and make decisions. This old-fashioned format is often grim for presenters, and even worse for participants. There are better ways to share information: ways that help people to learn, and make action more likely. Find recipes in this short ebook.