Whether your organization is using webinars to reach thousands of people across a large geography or offering online workshops designed for smaller audiences, there are certain educational concepts that need to be considered.
Whether your organization is using webinars to reach thousands of people across a large geography or offering online workshops designed for smaller audiences to provide a more intimate, localized, digital learning experience, there are certain educational concepts that need to be considered to ensure that your audiences are not only retaining but enjoying the content that is being presented online.
Those concepts generally revolve around best-practices developed through in-person teaching and training environments but when translated online, they offer some unique challenges and opportunities.
When in-person conferences, meetings, and other events shut down in early 2020, a majority percentage of businesses finally adopted web-conferencing technologies that had been around for years. While the technology was fairly simple, and offered some interesting bells and whistles, the learning curve was still apparent.
Organizers, trainers, and participants had to figure out everything from presentation capabilities and basic tech functionality and etiquette. And for most of that year, it was a meme-worthy circus in which the quality of the content and participant engagement was an afterthought.
But it never had to be - assuming that some basic experiential learning concepts were both understood and applied to an online environment.
Aligning Subject Matter Experts and Presenters
The smartest person on the team might not always be the best communicator and that’s okay. Acknowledging this early-on and then creating an environment in which SMEs and presenting talent can work together to develop content or curricula is a big key to any successful presentation, no matter what the environment.
Content Structure
As referenced in another article Do, Watch, Play, people retain information through a series of experiences that involve some form of initial activity, a reiterative demonstration of the activity by an expert, and then another opportunity to experience the original activity but with a newly formed understanding of the objective. This structure, combined with multiple presentation techniques and interactive material support, appeals to multiple learning types and provides the greatest material retention.
Multiple Content Formats
Talent should always present well and focus on being individually engaging (no matter what size audience) but the human attention span can only focus on a single form of presentation for a limited time. Our desire to experience dynamic neurostimuli is what causes our minds to drift, so to mitigate that natural response, digital learning content should leverage the many forms of engagement readily available in the online space.
2D and 3D animations, infographics, supplemental live-action video, interactive Q&As, quizzes, all help break up the monotony of the traditional "talking head” and keep audiences as fully engaged as possible.
Participant Access and Support
Other benefits of leveraging online channels for group presentations and training include the ability to produce live, simulated live (“simulive”), or on-demand experiences.
Many times, fully-produced online events can be recorded or captured in a way that allow for edits of those events to be repurposed for later use - either as simulated, live snippets or cataloged content that customers, employees, or other team members can access on demand. Advanced planning is key to building content that supports future use, but that can prove extremely valuable in getting more out of your content development and production expense.
In addition, offering web-based, downloadable resources for participants to access post-event can help reemphasize learning objectives and offer quick-reference materials for ongoing use.
And let’s not forget about the value of satisfaction scoring, learning assessments, and other forms of pre-, during-, and post-event surveying that can help guide learning design and training teams toward an ever-improving suite of experiences.
No matter what audience it is that you’re trying to affect - whether it be sales teams, channel partners, vendors, customers, or prospects - digitally presenting content can be a valuable and effective effort, but it must be done right.
To that end, we invite you to reach out to us to discuss any needs related to concept or program development, creative development, design or animation, technology support, platform integration, or to simply talk through what all is now available in the online presentation space.
It’s what Livetech has been doing since 2013 and we’d love to share with you some tricks of the trade. Contact us today to learn more.
