THREE TOOLS TO FOSTER PARTICIPANTS' DURING VIRTUAL TRAINING

21/10/20

10:00 am

One of the major concerns of virtual trainers is to keep the participants’ attention during the training session. This is a challenging task, but it is not impossible to achieve. It is important to be prepared and to use several facilitation activities supported by interactive and digital tools that encourage participation. Let’s review some of them.

​

Surveys

​

A survey –or a poll– is a very useful tool to measure and increase the level of attention of participants in virtual workshops. It consists in sharing an open question quickly and getting a response from the participants in real time. Surveys have several advantages:

• Getting participants’ attention and making them interact and give their opinion.

• Arousing participants’ interest, since they not only answer questions, but also get to know other opinions and results.

• Bringing up a topic of conversation in the group session that the trainer can use in different ways.

• Getting to know the participants, on a personal level, by asking questions about likes and preferences, and also, evaluating if they have paid attention to the training session by asking questions about its topic.

​

Breakouts 

​

Breakouts are a very useful tool to organize mini virtual sessions within a virtual room. They are used to create working groups, where each group works in a virtual room to solve a task as a team. After solving the task or the exercise, participants return to the group session to share their results and experiences. Breakouts have several advantages:

​

• Encouraging group participation.

• Sharing ideas in more detail.

• Relieving some tension for people who prefer to speak in small groups.

• Encouraging participants to get to know each other.

• Enriching class conversation.

​

Online Games 

​

Gamification is a trending technique that brings game mechanisms to learning. All human beings like to play so, when applied to training, this technique motivates participants to learn. Nowadays, there are gamification platforms that provide virtual trainers with simple tools to build games related to the learning content. An online trivia game is an easy-to-organize game, where they can prepare questions and answers beforehand. All participants who are connected to the session select their answers and accumulate points to win the game. The advantages of online games are the following: 

​

• Easing the formal training environment.

• Knowing that there is going to be a game in the session, participants worry about learning in order to win.

• Increasing participants’ commitment to the course and the company.

Just like these, there are other tools and strategies that we can use and combine to increase the effectiveness of the learning process.

​

Learn how to find these tools within your favorite virtual training tool (Teams, Zoom, Google Meet) by downloading the "Table of virtual training tools".