Webinar training

Impersonal, but practical.
Today I conducted a web based training session. It was weird, and completely different from a classroom based session.

Weird because, most trainers will tell you, they thrive on people inter-action, and its especially rewarding to watch your delegate do something they werent able to do before, and this is easy to check in the classroom, but its real difficult to do it over the phone. My session didnt have any camera, so the only interaction I get is from the phone. Even thats really limited, 12 people on the call, and I have to do most of the talking. There is a little bit they can do, the screen lets them put up a hand, applaud, show a smily, etc.

No body language at all - this is weird, too. Without being concious of it (sometimes), a delegate's body languge tells you what's going on with that person, and you can adjust accordingly, --- if you see they are felling left out, for example, you can ask them a question, smile at them, etc. But with only a phone and no screen, this makes it really difficult to tell wether people are listening, surfing the web, or even gone away to make tea!

By the same token, I can't use MY body langauge, either! So everything I do has to be communicated by the phone and on the screen. So I have to be very aware of speaking slowly and clearly.

Anyway, it went well, I think, there's no way to really gather feedback, evaluations are not really practical, though I suppose a system could be setup to gather them on-line somehow.

I try to make my classroom training fun, with lots of interaction between the students and me, but this was really difficult to do in this case. All I could do, really, was pop a few questions down the phone, and try and get some interaction that way. Even that's a challenge, they all seemed to wait for someone else to answer if I did that.

My next class, in a classroom, is in 2 weeks time, and I will be in Brussels, (I am currently near London).