How to improve your Zoom training sessions

Mix your media 

Remote training sessions can very quickly turn into hours of watching a talking head on a screen. When this happens, participants tend to continue to listen while casting theirs eyes around their room for anything more interesting to look at. Invariably something else will attract their attention, and their focus on the training will have been lost. 

But it’s easy to avoid this happening by giving participants something interesting to look at on their screens. In practice this means switching between you and video, photography or eye-catching graphics.  

Of course it may not be easy to find video or visuals which are relevant to the training, but making the effort to create something using a digital tool such as Sparkol VideoScribe or Easel.ly could be the difference between a remote training session which is interesting and effective and one which is a waste of everyone’s time. 

Make the training interactive 

If your remote training is not interactive, then you are expecting your participants to sit through the course in silence while you talk at them. In that case you might as well just write down the information you want to impart to them and hope that they read it. 

A better alternative is to provide opportunities for participants to participate in a more active way. The simplest way to do this is to use a feature such as Zoom’s "Raise Hand", allowing your participants to ask questions. You can also use the feature to interact with the participants by asking questions during your training such as "who has used this digital tool already?" or "who can think of a better way of doing this?"  

Another way of holding people’s attention through interaction is to use live polls. For example, if your training is about your charity’s products and services you could ask participants which service delivery channel they think is currently most in demand or which product they get asked about most. By asking participants to vote you are guaranteeing they are thinking about the subject in question.  

Use breakout rooms to create virtual training teams 

Learning by doing is an important part of most types of training, and it also provides a welcome break from learning by listening. A good way to make things interesting is to split participants into small groups of two or three and assign them to different breakout rooms in order to work on a task or to come up with a solution to a training problem such as how to improve operations and efficiency.   

An additional benefit of this type of virtual training is that it provides an opportunity for participants to get to know each other and work together for a short period even though they are working remotely.