A LOLA is a live online learning activity. There are different types of LOLAs and one of them is called video LOLA. This type of LOLA is an activity built around a video segment.
This type of LOLA enhances the instructional value of training videos. In a typical LOLA, the learners watch the video and participate in an activity to review and apply new concepts and skills. In a variation of video LOLA, the participants record a roleplay on their smart phones and provide feedback to the actors.
1. Alternative Audiences
In this LOLA, display a video designed to train a specific audience. Send teams of participants to breakout rooms and ask them to modify the video for a drastically different audience (such as 7-year-old children). Bring the teams to the main room and ask them to present their revised scripts. Conduct a debriefing discussion about the impact of the changes in the preferences and characteristics of changing audiences.
2. A Twist of Fate
This LOLA is conducted after the presentation of a case-study video. During the presentation, encourage the participants to pay attention to factors that influence the results. After the video, ask the participants to speculate on the consequences of a change in one of these factors (for example, a team member is replaced by an employee from West Africa). Ask the participants to open their mics and speculate on what would happen in the case study. Repeat the process by changing other factors, one at a time. Finally conduct a debriefing discussion about similar changes in the participants’ workplace.
3. Bashers and Boosters
This LOLA effectively follows a video about a potentially controversial idea. Ask the participants to watch a video about some new procedure, concept, technique, or strategy. After the video, ask teams of participants to make exaggerated presentations about the advantages and disadvantages associated with the controversial idea. Finally, conduct a debriefing discussion to brainstorm strategies for enhancing the advantages and reducing the disadvantages of the new idea.
4. Captions
The purpose of this LOLA is to show that body language, gestures, and facial expressions don’t have the same meaning across different cultures. Find a segment of a foreign soap opera with English subtitles. Display the characters talking to each other in their local language and the captions displaying the English translation. Play the segment without the captions. Ask teams of participants to work jointly in breakout rooms to guess the meaning of the dialogue. After about 10 minutes, play the same segment again, this time with the English captions. Send the teams to the breakout area to discuss what they guessed correctly and what they missed.
5.The End
This LOLA follows a story video. Before presenting a video, ask the participants to pretend to be scriptwriters and pay particular attention to the storyline. Stop the presentation at a suitable point and ask teams to create their own conclusions of the story. After a suitable time, ask each team to present a synopsis of their conclusion. Later, present the actual ending from the original video. Identify the winning team that created a conclusion that most closely resembles the actual ending. Debrief the activity by comparing alternative endings from the other reams.
6.Key Points
Display the video, asking the participants to note down the key points. At the conclusion of the video, organize the participants into teams and send each team to a separate breakout room. Ask the team members to combine their individual notes and come up with a consensus list of the top 5 key points. Explain that you will use a special scoring system to encourage the participants to think in terms of what the other teams would identify as key points. Each item in a team’s list will receive a number of points that equal the number of teams that recorded the same key point. (For example, if all four teams listed a same item, they will receive four points. On the other hand, if a single team listed a unique item, then that team gets 1 point.) Bring all teams to the main room and ask a team to select the most important item from their list. Find out how many other teams have this item in their list and award the appropriate score points (based on how many of them shared the same item). Repeat this procedure until you have scored all items from all teams. Identify the winning team with the highest number of score points.
7. Marketing Materials
The purpose of this LOLA is to focus on the key features in a training video. Display the video segment. Send teams of participants to breakout rooms to prepare a variety of marketing materials such as a blurb, a 100-word description of the content, bulleted sentences highlighting important points, and fake testimonials from audience members who watched the TV show. Bring the teams to the main room to present and discuss these marketing materials.
8. Quiz Interlude
This LOLA could accompany any type of video presentation. Ask the participants to take notes as they watch the video. After the presentation, assemble the participants into teams in different breakout rooms. Ask each team to come up with three closed questions and one open question based on the content of the video. Invite a randomly selected team to ask a closed question and to select an individual member of another team to respond. Award two points for a correct answer. Invite another team to ask its open question. Give all teams 30 seconds to prepare a response. Ask the questioning team to select a team and invite its spokesperson to give the response. Now ask another spokesperson for an alternative response. The questioning team decides which response is better and awards 5 points to the team that provided it. Repeat the process to permit each team to ask their question.
9. Rashomon
This LOLA follows presentation of a story involving an intercultural interaction. The LOLA is based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 classic Japanese movie, Rashomon, in which the same incident is recollected in different ways by the four major characters (a samurai, his wife, a bandit, and a woodcutter). At the beginning of this video LOLA, assign different key roles from the storyline to different participants. Ask the participants to watch the story from the assigned point of view. After the video, assemble participants into same-role teams in different breakout rooms and ask each team to rewrite the story from different characters’ points of view. After a suitable time, bring everyone to the main room and ask teams to present their versions of the story. Conduct a debriefing discussion, focusing on cultural and individual differences.