The world changed suddenly and learning went online. 

But people still don’t deliver Virtual Instructor Led Training (VILT) with tenderness and mercy.

The solution is simple, and surprisingly easy*. Just take the following five suggestions. 

That’s it. You’re done.

She’s marching toward compliance, although they don’t call it that. Her experience was awful, although she was kind enough to not say that to her uncle.

Having passed the one year mark of shelter in place, I’m used to getting on Zoom, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, and Webex. We all are.

Lots of days include more than 5 video meetings. That alone is a challenge.

But I haven’t been on the receiving end of VILT delivered to new employees. My niece has. She got hired into a job with a well known nonprofit helping young people at risk. So far, so good. 

Before she could start, though, he had to endure an endless array of training Zooms.

Many of them went two hours without a break.

Few had any interactivity at all.

This my niece, dammit. She’s an admirable young adult for whom I’ve got great respect. And when she ventures into my area of the working world, learning, our industry makes her trudge an endless tunnel of gray concrete. She’s marching toward compliance, although they don’t call it that. Her experience was awful, although she was kind enough to not explain it that way to her uncle.

The pandemic disrupted the learning industry

For those of us in the learning and development sphere, the pandemic disrupted not only where and how learning experiences get delivered, but challenged the design of those experiences. 

The learning Industry was delivering classroom training the same way it had been delivered for years when the shelter in place orders came in. There was too much PowerPoint, too much lecture, too much old school learning. But the learners were together, in the same room. They could connect and socialize.

No one was prepared to do everything virtually.

Even more so, no one was prepared to deliver the kind of VILT that would be effective, positively received, and contribute to the organizational culture.

One friend, Randy Coin, partner at Coin Harlan Consulting, said, “I’ve been talking adult learning principles for years, but now we all live them. When learning doesn’t respect adult learning principles now we lose our audience.”

Painting with oils vs. painting with watercolors

While it may seem obvious to point out that when you switch from one medium to another you need to change your perspective, my nephew’s experience suggests otherwise. What works well in a live class may not translate into the same powerful learning when delivered virtually.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to film a play and deliver through television? So much gets left out, or falls flat.

This is true for virtual instructor-led training. The medium determines what works, and design must always account for how a learning experience will be delivered.

Many breaks, shorter sessions

If you do nothing else, do this.

Never go an hour without breaking up the experience. People need breaks for food and water, using the bathroom, and mental health. Especially the latter. 

Breaks demonstrate that you care about your learners.

If you have a deliverable that lasts for an entire day, consider delivering it in two halfway sessions. You get the benefit of your learners having made sense of the material overnight, heightening retention, and they are spared the exhaustive intensity of too much time spent video conferencing in a single day.

Get help

Facilitating virtually is more complicated than doing so live. This is especially true if you aren’t just reading a script about a slide.

When you share the facilitation, you and your partner swap jobs. One leads the experience in the moment, from presentation, speaking, and managing the pace to engaging the audience. The other acts as producer.

This provides more variety to your learners, simple because different people bring different vibes to the role.

Your producer can manage technical problems as they arise, monitor the chat, set up breakout rooms, and manage polling.

Constant engagement

Interactivity is the key.

You don’t want to be the Netflix movie their partner wants them to see. When the learners are involved, they learn.

Get their attention right from the start by welcoming them and asking them  to answer a question in chat.

Use polls, whiteboards, and annotation tools to get their input as you proceed. When they connect the moment to their own experience they build schema, bring their emotions into the process, and start applying the content to their workplace role.

Stick the experience in the blender

Chances are good that you are introducing data, new ideas, and “how to” information during the session. If so, you’re in luck.

Pull the new content out of the VILT and find a way to introduce it to the learner ahead too time. If it needs to go in a flat pdf, that’s still better than reading slides on a screen.

Then use the time together to be together.

Be yourself plus

Zoom provides a flat moving image with sound. In itself that’s amazing. I didn’t grow up thinking such a thing would be possible in my lifetime. And without Zoom delivering learning remotely would be impossible, not to mention the astounding way we’ve all been able to keep up with loved ones during the shelter in place.

But all of our evolutionary history points to having live experiences with other people in the same room.

We give up one dimension and multiple indefinite emotional inputs and outputs when we move from live learning experiences to virtual ones.

So up your animation, up your emotional presence, and up your antenna. Be more yourself than you’re used to being when facilitating live training. Turn it up a notch or so.

A vision for virtual instructor-led training

I keep thinking of the dull monotony of my nephew’s training experience.
He deserves better. We all do.
When everything works out, virtual experiences can carry all of the depth and weight or live ones. Virtual instructor led training can deeply affect the learners and leave them musing about their experience for a long time.
Design for VILT, deliver for VILT, and your content will provide the learning experience your audience deserves.