One of the unexpected positive impacts of the coronavirus pandemic is the increased use of virtual classrooms. My grandson is currently taking his eighth-grade lessons over the Internet. My managers are receiving their project management training through a webinar.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Virtual Classrooms
In addition to providing physical distance (unfortunately labeled as social distance), virtual classrooms have several cost-effective advantages, especially in the corporate training field:
Most trainers and participants are familiar with webinars that are used in disseminating corporate information. These webinars can also be delivered on smart phones and tablets.
Facilitators can easily upload PowerPoint slides to organize their presentation.
Training webinars can be recorded and archived for study by people who missed the original session.
Webinar platforms are becoming less expensive and more reliable, flexible, and user friendly.
Virtual classrooms have limitations and disadvantages also. Here are some of them:
Webinars expand the reach of dull data dumps. They encourage subject-matter experts indulge in one-way communication.
People who lack computer literacy have difficulty figuring out how to participate in a webinar.
In spite of their increasing reliability, webinar platforms present some problems. The local bandwidth and the Internet speed may not be sufficient for the needs of interactive training sessions.
The major disadvantage of a training webinar is the lack of interactivity among the participants and between the learning content and the learners. To reduce the impact of this problem, my colleagues and I have been designing and delivering interactive experiential activities in virtual classrooms. Not all face-to-face activities can be exported to a webinar session. However, there are creative techniques for adapting classroom to a webinar. In addition, some online strategies (example: instant polling) can be conducted more effectively in a virtual classroom than in an actual classroom.
All About LOLAs
LOLAs are different types of live online learning activities that are incorporated in training webinars. There are different types of LOLAs and they all usually require the learners to respond to questions, polls, and discussions.
Here are five sample types of LOLAs:
Interactive Lectures. These LOLAs transform passive presentations into active exercises. Before, during, and after a lecture presentation, the facilitator conducts quizzes, challenges, and discussions.
Structured Sharing. These LOLAs help the participants learn from each other and learn with each other. Structured sharing activities typically use a procedure for exchanging, organizing, and evaluating the participants’ experiences, best practices, knowledge, and opinions.
Magical LOLAs. These LOLAs feature relevant conjuring tricks as a online training activity. The tricks are used as processes to be analyzed, reconstructed, or coached. They also provide memorable metaphors for key principles related to the training objective.
Thought Experiments. These LOLAs require the participants to mentally rehearse new patterns of behavior or conduct imaginary dialogues. Combined with self-reflection, these cognitive exercises produce increased self-awareness and mastery of new skills and concepts.
Jolt LOLAs. These LOLAs are built around short, surprising experiential activities. A set of open-ended debriefing questions encourage the participants to reflect on the jolt, gain appropriate insights, and share them with each other.
During the past 10 years, we have explored more than 20 types of LOLAs. Ten of these types of are explained and elaborated in my book on LOLAs. In future articles in these series, I plan to provide explanations and examples of several of the other types.