Here in the United States, after a year of COVID-19 we are hopefully slowly starting to return to resuming some training activities in person again. But everything will not suddenly return back to “normal”. We now know that may need to be ready to deliver in-person training or in-person conference sessions in a different way. So how can organizations best help their presenters convert their programs from in-person to virtual delivery?
Retrofitting your existing programs to try to do the same thing, just in a virtual environment is tempting. Keep in mind, however, that virtual delivery offers opportunities for which in-person instruction doesn’t allow… and there are some things you can do in-person that you just can’t do online. Below, you’ll find a lesson plan that we’ve created for a 90-minute session that you can use to help educate your staff, co-workers or clients on ways to think through the conversion from in-person to online instruction.
You can download a pdf version of this lesson plan. Feel free to use it in its existing form, or use it as inspiration to be modified and adapted to meet your organization’s specific circumstances.
This lesson plan was developed in our online tool called Soapbox, and generating the activities took about 10 minutes, with a little more time invested in customizing the activities to the content in this lesson.
If you don’t have the time to teach others at your organization how to develop an effective, engaging virtual training session, or if you just want to save time and effort trying to think about what virtual activities could actually engage your learners, Soapbox is a tool that can take a lot of the work off of your shoulders.
Currently, Soapbox allows you to generate in-person training guides, but an update that is scheduled to be released in the next few weeks that will allow you to generate virtual programs as well.
Regardless of how you choose to prepare your organization for virtual delivery, don’t forget to take the features that your specific platform allows you to use to engage your learners. Here are several resources on which features your virtual training platform may offer as well as which features may help you connect your learning objectives with your learning activities.
If you think Soapbox may be of interest, let’s chat for 15 minutes about your challenges with converting to virtual training.
