Face-to-face training goes virtual

These are strange times to be living in! A few short weeks ago, I was riding my bike to school to teach undergraduates on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and driving down I-25 on Tuesdays and Thursdays to train professionals at companies along the Front Range. Now, I’m teaching from a whiteboard I hung on a wall in my house. The commute is shorter, but I miss the classroom interactions.

Thursday was my first time teaching one of our face-to-face sessions, Brush-Up English, using video conferencing tools. To my surprise, the session went very well, and I had a wonderful group of participants who were engaged and responsive as we worked from 8:30am until 3pm. And even though it went well and I was able to provide useful information and practice on concepts, I still noticed how substantially different the experience was.

Our face-to-face trainings are designed to be interactive. I watch people’s expressions to check for questions, see who has an answer but missed the opportunity to share, or gauge whether the group is getting what I’m saying or needs me to try to explain in another way. Out of the 9 participants in the virtual class, only 4 enabled their video most of the session.

Instead of visual cues, I tried to listen for audible ones, but most of the participants had politely muted themselves to hear me clearly. When people did respond to my questions, several people would answer at once and I couldn’t tell who was trying to answer. Sometimes there were delays in responses as people paused to unmute themselves and then repeat what they had said while muted.

Also, in my training sessions, I walk around the room a lot, reading over participants’ shoulders to check their exercises casually and praising them or offering gentle corrections and reminders. In the virtual space, participants must volunteer to share, so people who don’t volunteer may be even more overlooked. In my training sessions, I try to engage everyone, but in the virtual space when I can’t see everyone or hear everyone, that interaction is much harder.

Despite these challenges, our session worked. I am amazed that we have the tools in place allowing us to continue doing face-to-face training in some capacity, and I’m happy doing it for now out of necessity but look forward to returning to classrooms for this kind of training soon!

At the same time, the advantages and possibilities of online education are clear: it allows people who are removed from each other by time and space to still learn together. But the design of an online course is entirely different from the design of a live, in-person training.

For that reason, Appendance is developing an online course, Better Business Writing, to be released May 26. The course is built so that participants can benefit from working independently and at their own pace, integrating coursework to their job experiences and applying the tools immediately, while also checking in with a coach and small group once a week to provide that community and support. When we design courses to function online, they can be incredibly beneficial for participants.

We look forward to offering an online course that will support all our participants who want to improve their writing skills, enhance their credibility, and form stronger relationships with the people they write to.