Figuring Out Virtual Live Training

I get to stay home now, but my job has gotten much more difficult since 2019.

Prior to the pandemic, I was traveling for about 2 weeks a month to teach programming classes at businesses. I taught in 20 different U.S. states, as well as in Canada, the U.K., and Thailand. For someone who loves to travel as much as I did then, it was the perfect gig. I’d show up in a new city on Saturday, spend Sunday exploring, teach all week (while exploring local restaurants and bars at night), then usually spend Saturday exploring again. The best part was that it was all paid for someone else.

Here’s a photo from a class I taught in Bangkok.

At just about the point where I was beginning to get burnt out from airports and having to go to Phoenix again, the pandemic brought all that to a screeching halt. For two years, I was basically unemployed. I knew that the companies I was previously conducting classes for had switched to Zoom or Microsoft Teams. But, I had only taught a virtual live class once, and I hated the experience so much that I was determined to find a different way to make money.

When my new plan for making money failed (more on that later!) I started saying yes to virtual online training. Now that I’ve been doing it regularly for a while, I have some observations and experiences to share.

Online training is difficult for everyone

Live online training is far more difficult that in-person. In addition to the normal challenges associated with keeping students’ attention and communicating new information clearly, other challenges include:

• It’s impossible to know for sure whether people are paying attention. I figure that no matter what I do at least half of the students in my class are doing something else while I’m teaching. In at least one instance, the something else they were would get you immediately fired if you did it in any other classroom … and I only know about that instance because this student forgot to mute his microphone.

• Even when students are obviously engaged and enjoying the class, online classes that last 7 or 8 hours are exhausting. In a physical classroom, I can get the students to move around and interact with each other. In a virtual class, many students work through the breaks and remain at least half paying attention to class for the full 8 hour day.

• Depending on what’s customary at the students’ company, most students in my classes might leave their video turned off. It’s not unusual for me to teach a five day class without ever making eye contact with some of the students in my class.

• Students in the class are often in different timezones. In recent classes, I’ve had students who were in each of the four timezones in the continental U.S. as well as in India. Usually, this means that I teach on Eastern Time or Central Time (so, class starts at 6 or 7am for me). A class that starts at 9:00 central time isn’t finished for students on the east coast until 6 or 7:00. Lunch breaks for students on the west coast happen at 9:00 or 10:00am. And, I feel horrible for the poor students who are starting class in India at 6:30PM and going until 2:30AM.

How I’m making it better

I have found ways to make virtual live training better, however. Many of the new skills I’ve had to pick up to make it work have also made me a better teacher. Some of the things I do differently now include:

• I need to be more excited and exciting than I’m capable of being in person.

• I’ve come up with new ways to encourage interaction and active participation in the class. Some activities I’d do in an in person class just don’t translate well, so I’ve replaced them with activities that are uniquely well-suited to doing online, such as shared whiteboards and collaborative coding.

• At the beginning of each day of the class I conduct a detailed review of what was covered the previous day. I do this in live classes as well, but in online classes I spend considerably more time on review. This serves to help solidify the new information in the minds of students who were present the previous day, but it also catches up those students who had to step away to deal with a work emergency or for another reason.

• At the beginning of each day I ask each student to name something they learned the previous day, mention something else that they’re looking forward to learning, and to let me know if they have any “blockers.” Blockers can be everything from not fully understanding something I taught or to having to attend a meeting between 11:30 and 12:00, or having to pick up their kid at 3:00.

It’s easy for students who get distracted or who aren’t paying close attention to an online class to become completely disengaged when they start to fall behind. When that happens, it’s much more difficult to help them get back on track. The most important key to successfully keeping everyone on board, for me, has been to check in with each student regularly and to recognize the early signs that they may be drifting away.

This is my new world

I haven’t been asked to do an in-person training since March 2020, and I’m glad. The thought of getting on a plane and staying in a hotel for a week seems foreign and sort of disgusting to me now. It’s certainly less expensive for the company where I’m training for them to not have to pay for my sushi habit.

I’m busier than ever with online training. So, I guess this is the way I do it training now. Would I consider doing live training in the future? Probably. But, I’ve gotten really comfortable at home and I really like my home office / studio.

And so, in spite of the difficulties and new challenges of online live training, I’ve come around to loving it and I’m looking forward to continuing to get better at it.