Presenting training over Zoom — paper manuals and a document camera

I run some courses for my employer, Biotext. They are usually announced on the Biotext training page.

I’ve been particularly pleased these last 12 months with the course we’ve called Fundamentals of data literacy and visualisation. Why? Because I proposed it, wrote most of it and present it. Further, I’ve developed (I would not say invented) a somewhat idiosyncratic way of presenting it online over Zoom that seems to be working quite well. (We do gather feedback, so I am not making this up.)

I wanted to move the training online in the year(s) of COVID but without sacrificing the close interaction with the skilled facilitator (or with me). We usually do not run huge courses — 10 people, say — and that allows us to discuss specific issues that pertain to someone’s work or communication needs. The courses are very interactive and hands on, and I wanted to keep the online versions as much like the live ones as possible.

We traditionally, and for good reasons, provide participates with a high-quality, professionally printed manual. This has several uses.

1. For it works as a useful reference, long after the course is over.
2. It includes exercises and answers, so gives people a place to make notes, tackle exercises and so on, and keep it all in one place.
3. For those with limited screen real estate, it acts like a second screen. They don’t have to flick back and forth between windows or anything.
4. (I believe that) sitting there with a pen in your hand, making notes, helps listening. If you listen with the intent of abstracting the key messages from what the speaker is saying and noting them down, you listen more actively. Even if you never read the notes, they help. Handwriting allows rapuid sketchy diagrams and interpolations and suchlike.

Of course, if people want an e-version, we can supply that too.

As facilitation, I have my own copy of the manual. I sit it on the desk under a document camera. I like document cameras  because they capture what is really going on, not a carefully edited and redacted version. When I ask the participants to to an exercise, I open the book under the camera and do it myself. They can see me do it. Skwetch the graph, make a mistake, try again. And so they have a better idea of what an answer might look like. If they have a query I can sketch up a little solution or suggestion.

A page from one of our manuals, viewed by the document camera

And they see my hand going back and forth, pausing in thought, and so on. The Zoom experience becomes more human and organic and flexible.

I find it helps interactivity. People bored with a section can read the advanced material in the appendixes, or doodle, I suppose.

 

Anyway, that’s what I think