Training the e-trainer

by Clive Shepherd


Perhaps not surprisingly, the virtual classroom appears tantalisingly similar to its bricks and mortar equivalent and trainers can justifiably expect to make use of many of their existing skills. However, there is a difference in working with an audience that could be thousands of miles away and which, to all intents and purposes, is invisible. In this article, Clive Shepherd explores what it is that the e-trainer needs to do differently to make a success of virtual classroom training and realise the benefits that synchronous online communication can bring to just about any organisation with a distributed workforce.

Contents
E-learning's best kept secret
What virtual classrooms are
What makes a good virtual classroom session
The skills of the e-trainer
Who makes a good e-trainer
Getting started
Case study: Serversys
Resources

E-learning's best kept secret

Sometimes it seems like virtual classrooms are e-learning's best kept secret. According to my own survey of nearly 300 trainers conducted over the last two years, only 7% had ever participated in a virtual classroom, the rest blissfully unaware of what one was. This compares with approximately 25% who had completed some form of self-study e-learning, online or on CD-ROM.

It's not as if virtual classrooms are particularly new, having been available in much the form they are now for as long as e-learning has been employing the Internet and intranets as channels. It's just that the predominant paradigm in e-learning has been and probably still is interactive self-study in the CBT tradition, even though virtual classrooms provide a basis for learning which is much closer to the experience of the typical non-technology-based trainer.

It's time to rectify all that. In practically every seminar for trainers in which I've been able to demonstrate a virtual classroom (just a recording, not even a live event), the result has been the same. Trainers understand almost straight away what virtual classrooms can do, they can see how they could work in their organisations (particularly those which are geographically dispersed) and they want to know what's involved in having a go. And having a go is what this article's all about.

What virtual classrooms are

Just in case you’re one of the 93% who has never participated in a virtual classroom and are keen to know what on earth they are, here’s a quick primer. Virtual classrooms are applications of web conferencing technology, which allows computer users to communicate in real-time over the Internet or an intranet. Web conferencing is typically more than a simple text-based chat room; it allows groups of users to communicate in voice or video and to share all kinds of resources, such as slides, documents, electronic whiteboards (to which all users can contribute simultaneously), shared applications or even whole desktops, synchronised web surfing and much more. Virtual classrooms extend this technology to add the sorts of features that make real-time, virtual training a practical option, including polls, questions, surveys (virtual happy sheets), break-out sessions and record-keeping.

Virtual classrooms are offered by a number of major US providers, including Centra, WebEx, PlaceWare, InterWise, LearnLinc and, in the UK, NetTutor. You’ll also find virtual classroom modules built into many learning management systems. All provide the core functionality required to make a success of virtual training, although clearly there are many differences in the details and in the price your organisation will have to pay. The extent to which web conferencing has become mainstream, particularly since the events of 9/11 brought home the risks of air travel, has been borne out by the decision in May for Microsoft to acquire PlaceWare. Watch this space to see just how much web conferencing functionality ends up built-in to future versions of Windows.

What makes a good virtual classroom session

Before looking at the skills needed by e-trainers (those that run virtual classrooms), it makes sense to reflect on what a good virtual classroom session would look like if you were to meet it. Anyone who has attended a number of sessions is likely to have already encountered the dreaded ‘death by PowerPoint’, this time the virtual variety. In case you haven’t, death by PowerPoint is almost as painful as its face-to-face counterpart, with the exception that the trainer doesn’t get to see the expressions of pain and the trainees can ameliorate the situation by reading their emails or playing Solitaire at the same time.

Steve Dineen, CEO of fuel, expresses the dangers: “More progressive learning organisations realise that virtual classrooms have the potential to combine the strengths of both self-study e-learning and classroom training. Unfortunately, in many cases what actually gets combined are the worst weaknesses of poorly-designed e-learning and instructor-led training. Many early attempts at virtual classrooms have consisted of trainers merely delivering slides on-line, which removes the positive aspects of classroom training, such as the instructor reading the body language of learners, realising who is understanding and who is not and which learners have let their attention wander. In addition many current virtual classroom sessions remove the best part of self-study e-learning, which is rich interactive content based around sound educational psychology principles. On-line education can be so much more that PowerPoint and audio.”

A good virtual classroom session is like a good face-to-face session – interactive. Julie Linn, e-Learning Manager for the Training Foundation, has been adapting the IITT’s successful ‘TAP’ (Certified Trainer Assessment Programme) methodology to the virtual classroom: “It’s important to engage your learners using the skills you’d use face-to-face, encouraging exploration and providing plenty of opportunities for practice. This is even more important in the virtual classroom, because you can lose your audience and not even know that they’ve gone. Trainers need to be creative to use the facilities provided by the software in ensuring maximum participation.”

Linn explains: “At first, trainers will feel like they are doing a classroom session blindfold. When you consider that 80% of the sensory information that the brain receives is visual, this can seem a major obstacle. We encourage e-trainers to use polls and chat features to find out as much as they can about their audience at the start of the session. By using plenty of interaction, supported by quality visuals – not just endless bullet points – the virtual classroom is likely to be a real success.”

The skills of the e-trainer

The successful classroom trainer is more than 50% of the way along the road to being an effective e-trainer, but some skills have to be honed and others acquired from scratch. Sanjay Dalal is Director of Training Center Business for virtual classroom provider WebEx: “The e-trainer needs the ability to adapt training materials to be extremely visual, allowing plenty of opportunities for trainees to interact using online tools, such as the whiteboard, polling and application sharing. And because virtual classroom sessions are relatively short – averaging about one hour – e-trainers need to be able ‘chunk’ materials appropriately, both in terms of length and in terms of the logical flow of the course as a whole.”

E-trainers also need effective soft skills, as Dalal explains: “The e-trainer needs to be a very strong facilitator, with the ability to call on people and get them involved, combined with active listening skills and the use of a variety of questioning techniques. Sometimes the trainer will inject some humour into the mix to create a more relaxed, yet interactive forum for trainees.”

Mark Stimson is General Manager, EMEA for Click2Learn, which incorporates a fully-featured virtual classroom into their learning management solution Aspen: “It’s important for e-trainers to use their classroom experience to keep the group engaged. The best way to accomplish this is through interaction, to the extent of students actually taking over part of the session.”

Stimson emphasises the importance of preparation: “Trainers need to pay adequate attention to getting ready for the session. This means not only preparing the materials but ensuring there will be no technical hiccoughs. All connections need to be tested with learners to resolve firewall issues and to ensure bandwidth is adequate for what you are proposing to do. You may not be able to use streamed audio, video or application sharing on the worst connections, in which case you’ll have to concentrate on less hungry media, such as slides, polls and chats.”

Stimson goes on: “What happens afterwards is equally important if the learning process is to be effective. One idea is to follow-up the virtual event with an asynchronous discussion forum, which keeps the learning alive and allows learners to reflect”. Stimson quotes learning guru Peter Honey: “Life is just a series of befores, durings and afters, with the quality of the during largely determined by what happens before and what happens after it.”

Of course, even the best trainers can find themselves with a difficult audience, that just doesn’t seem suited to a virtual approach. Kathy Morris is European Learning and Development Manager for Parametric Technology, supplier of product lifecycle management solutions: “Our challenge was to train managers around Europe on the company’s new performance management system. Unfortunately our Southern European managers were less than enthusiastic about the idea of virtual training. The problem was largely one of language. In the classroom, they were able to undertake exercises in their own language and help each other over any misunderstandings. This didn’t look it would be possible online. In the end we compromised on a unique blended solution: the course started with pre-work, done on a self-study basis; we then ran a hybrid live and virtual event in which the group met locally and I provided my input online, using PlaceWare. I would set an activity off, go offline and wait for the group to complete the activity. We would then ’reconvene’ for a report back. The solution worked, saving a great deal of my time and budget in the process.”

Who makes a good e-trainer

Can any trainer adapt to working online? Not so, says Don Taylor, Director of InfoBasis and host of the free monthly web seminars run by Learning Technologies: “There’s one type of trainer who is good in the classroom and hopeless online, and that’s the ‘classroom charismatic’. This person has the force of personality to succeed face-to-face, but much of the time is just winging it. Online, when neither party has the visual cues, it all breaks down. It’s so hard to get people to listen to you if you are not well structured and you’re just a voice. The good e-trainer does not need to be charismatic, but they do need structure and an ability to both get learners involved and respond to the audience’s needs.”

According to Taylor, part of the problem lies with our diminishing ability to learn through listening: “Four hundred years ago, people could listen attentively to a Shakespeare play lasting three and a half hours – we simply don’t have that attention span. The percentage of auditory learners is quite small, so you simply have to compensate with the right visuals. For the e-trainer, the voice is very important – some voices simply don’t work online. The speaker needs to be able to modulate their voice, vary the pace and carry their enthusiasm. It’s not acceptable online to be ‘umming’ and ‘ahing’ all the time.”

Tom Sandman is Training Design Consultant at QA Training. QA have been making use of LearnLinc’s virtual classroom software in their blended MCSA and Project Management courses: “We only take volunteers – we don’t insist all our trainers teach online. On the whole, trainers enjoy the change of mode – we provide them with broadband capability so they can work from home.”

QA has also been carrying out research, in conjunction with Middlesex University, on the profiles of successful virtual classroom students: “Virtual classrooms are best for students who have control of their diaries. The time of system administrators is much less predictable than that of project managers, as they are subject to all sorts of short-term emergencies. We have also found that reflectors really enjoy the sessions, perhaps more so than activists. We have users who don’t make a big active contribution to the sessions, but are busy listening and taking notes. They get a lot out of it. But maybe the most important factor is the extent to which learners are allowed the space by their managers to attend the virtual sessions at the scheduled times.”

Getting started

The first step for any trainer interested in building their skills as an e-trainer is to participate in as many virtual classroom sessions as possible. Free sessions are run regularly by the major vendors to provide an overview of their systems and their capabilities. Trainers can also take advantage of the free online seminars run on the last Thursday of each month by Learning Technologies or the online events run regularly for members by the Institute of IT Training.

The Training Foundation is currently developing a Certification track for e-trainers, launching this July, based on the IITT’s new e-trainer competency framework. The course recognises the fact that there are really two roles in a virtual classroom session – the host and the trainer. Although both roles may be played by the same person, in many cases a partnership is required.

Morris acknowledges the dual roles: “The move for the good trainer to an e-trainer is not very far but it can be very scary. Those unfamiliar with the medium can find it hard to both adapt to the software and its peculiarities and remember to be a good trainer. A good way to start is to work with a colleague on a dual basis – one person looks after the controls, the other does the training.”

Trainers who may be feeling a little apprehensive about taking the plunge into virtual training would do well to take Morris’ advice. Get together with your training colleagues – at least those who cannot be described as ‘classroom charismatics’ – and help each other to bridge the gap from the face-to-face to the virtual world. You may just appreciate you made the move the next time you hear stories of a trainer stuck in a traffic jam on the way home from a course hundreds of miles from home.

Case study: Serversys

Serversys is the UK’s leading value added reseller for GoldMine Business Contact Manager, a customer relationship management solution. In 2002, Serversys started to employ WebEx web conferencing software as a way of providing customer support, taking advantage of the product’s extensive desktop sharing capabilities. Serversys soon realised that WebEx had the potential to be employed as a channel for virtual training, extending the range of training options available to customers.

Phil Catterall is Technical Director for Serversys: “A typical customer for GoldMine is a salesperson working from home. It can be both difficult and expensive to get salespeople in a room for training, so it’s obviously appealing when to be able to take the training direct to them in their homes. There are also learning advantages: after a whole day classroom session, many trainees are becoming brain dead; chunking up sessions and delivering them virtually means we maximise attention levels.”

Caterall admits there are limitations: “Some of our customers are not that computer literate, so we could not dispense with an initial classroom session. Where we see the greatest potential is for follow-up training on particular topics. This is additional revenue for us and enables us to productively use any spare trainer time.”

Training Consultant Phil Brown has found it relatively easy to adapt to virtual training: “The WebEx software has been seamlessly integrated into our website, even thought it is hosted separately. To use WebEx, customers only have to download a small ActiveX control before their first usage. The product is extremely secure, which is important because the main facility we exploit is desktop sharing.”

Serversys have developed a unique model of virtual training, working with small groups of just two or three. Brown explains: “The idea is to guide rather than demonstrate. With the lack of a visual presence, you have to be able to monitor the learner’s progress in other ways, ideally through practical exercises. Interestingly, we have done sessions where only one customer representative attends, usually the system administrator, but other users look in using a big screen projector.” As Brown would attest, we’re only just beginning to see the wide range of ways in which virtual classrooms can be employed.

Resources

Virtual classroom suppliers:
WebEx: www.webex.com
Placeware: www.placeware.com
Centra: www.centra.com
InterWise: www.interwise.com
LearnLinc: www.supportit-uk.com
NetTutor: www.nettutor.co.uk
Horizon Wimba: www.horizonwimba.com

Free web seminars using virtual classrooms:
Learning Technologies: www.learningtechnologies.co.uk 
Institute of IT Training: www.iitt.org.uk/public/events/index.asp

Training for e-trainers:
Training Foundation: www.trainingfoundation.com