Digitalising Training (3/6) - Facilitation

After last week’s talk of activities, let’s discuss facilitation constraints (for virtual classes) to take into account when digitalising training.

There are two aspects to this: the trainer side and the learner side.  

You might be alone when facilitating a face-to-face course but there are probably at least three (but ideally four) people facilitating the online version:

• two people who know the content (and who can make the course more lively by e.g. bouncing ideas off each other) and
• two people managing the breakout rooms (assigning, opening, moving people from one to another, closing), sharing links (sometimes different links for different groups), helping learners with technical issues, checking why they haven’t connected, etc.

Why should there be two of each? If one person’s internet suddenly dies, then the other one can take over. This also means your ‘lesson plan’ should be quite detailed, allowing everyone to know who’s doing what and when.  

From the learner side, organisations will probably push to have more people online than face-to-face as there is no space constraint. It’s tempting but here’s the question: is it more important that lots of people do the course, or that they actually learn from it? If you want the latter, research shows that the optimal number of participants is between 12 and 20. This will of course depend on the kind of course and the outcome you aim for. Some reasons below:

• Group activities should take place with no more than 4-5 people to support participation and engagement. The more people there are, the more groups to manage, the more complex the logistics, the more time needed for plenary feedback.
• Even if there are many small group activities, chances are two-three (tech savvy) people are going to overtake the conversation in plenary. This is harder to control online than face-to-face.
• Going from one breakout room to another to check what’s happening takes time, so the more groups there are, the less likely it is the facilitator will be able to get a real overview of how much people are getting it, what issues they're having, etc.
• Online, there are so many things to manage at the same time that it’s easier for people to go unnoticed. It’s fairly obvious to see that people are checking their phones in a face-to-face environment, less so online. If you can’t see everyone on the same screen, it’s difficult to have a feel for whether people are actually paying attention.

How you’re going to facilitate cannot be a last minute consideration, as it will impact how you design the digital version of your course. And the design will be next week’s topic. Feel free to comment below before then.

Happy week!