How to Provide an Effective Live Training Session Through Virtual Classrooms?
A virtual classroom is an online educational environment that facilitates live interactions between educators and students as they participate in educational activities. These two-way engagements happen through live sessions.
Virtual classrooms come equipped with essential tools to deliver learning materials in various types to provide both individual and group-based learning activities to students.
In a virtual classroom, teachers play a significant role of a mentor who leads the teaching process and supports discussions and activities for interactive learning.
Synchronous live virtual classes have the capability to offer great learning experience to students by addressing the unique requirements of the students as they relate to real-time interaction and classroom-like learning.
They also help you create new standards in learning experiences that go beyond the constraints of the physical classroom and teaching techniques.
How Do Virtual Classrooms Work?
The live online classes offer a lot of learning opportunities when blended with LMS or when used with real classroom-like educational activities.
Unlike a traditional learning environment, the live classes allow educators to get instant feedback from learners, direct tutor-learner interaction, and interactive activities to facilitate active participation and motivation.
Real-time interaction facilitates building strong relationships within the community. Learning and teaching in a virtual classroom offer a learning experience just like in a traditional classroom, it takes new approaches to include student-centered instruction, collaborative learning, high interactivity, positive and constructive feedback.
High Level Of Interaction
Teaching in a live class can be effective with the participation, support, and interaction of learners. This facilitates an engaging educational environment and helps the learners and educators to achieve best results.
During the live training classes, the teacher must encourage the learners to actively take part in the class activities. You can integrate a wide range of activities like small group discussions, brainstorming, collaborative activities, Q&A sessions, etc.
When you deliver lectures, make sure you focus on your classes and allow your learners to study independently with interactive collaboration.
Unlike traditional classrooms where students learn at their own level of comfort and pace, live training sessions facilitate a teaching method where the students and teachers collaborate, actively participate, and communication is encouraged.
The teachers create a setup for both individual and group learning and help the students in building and acquiring the skills they require.
Collaborative Learning
Collaborative learning implies the students must work together to attain a common learning goal, exchange views, understand the meaning of concepts, or solve assignments together.
It creates opportunities for interaction that are subjected to discussion and exploring the differences in the participants, level of skills, position, etc. This approach involves an active process of the collective construction of knowledge using the community as a means of mutual support.
Variety Of Learning Activities
This modern teaching approach takes different levels of needs and learning styles of students into consideration. The grasping power of each student is different and a virtual classroom can offer a tailor-made learning experience that complements their unique requirements.
When tutors use different types of content presentation and delivery methods like images, texts, audio, video, infographics, animations, etc. which facilitates flexible learning set up, it helps to retain the attention and interest of learners.
Combining different types of educational activities in live training sessions serves to meet the broad range of the requirements of the students.
Instant Feedback Sharing
Virtual classrooms allow both teachers and students to share instant feedback in an individual and general way.
The main role of the educator here is to create an environment of positive feedback by guiding the learning community’s interaction. It also helps to build a learning environment that fosters confidence and helps students to achieve their full potential.
Tips To Deliver Effective Live Training
How do expert online trainers deliver their live virtual classes? What are the strategies they use differently and how can you do the same? By preparing for your classes beforehand, and engaging your learner base, you can run your virtual classroom effectively.
With that said, let’s look in-depth into the tips and techniques you need to follow to deliver effective live training.
Make Sure Your Platform Doesn’t Malfunction
As your students are at the core of your teaching business, they are your customers and you need to treat them like that. To ensure the success of your online training sessions, make sure you give them the best learning experience you can offer.
The virtual teaching environment being reliant on technology, ensures that your teaching platforms work fine before going live.
As the competition in the education industry is fierce, if your live virtual classroom doesn’t function properly, your students would choose your competitors instead.
Grab Attention With Visual Elements
Consider enriching your live training sessions with visual elements to capture student attention and facilitate interaction. The attention span of the younger generation is shorter than ever and putting large chunks of plain text on your presentations will not help with delivering your message to them.
As we all are visual beings, students love to watch their classes along with hearing it. Visual elements also help students grasp and understand the information better than audio.
Use infographics, podcasts, videos, charts, animation, diagrams, etc. Wherever it is necessary to make your live training sessions more interesting and interactive.
Have Pre-Live Training Activities
In a live virtual classroom, there might be students who choose to come in early, so you must prepare pre-session activities to keep them engaged as well. Prepare polls, classroom activities, word puzzles, or any sort of interactive activities programmed so that you can keep them away from boredom.
This will not only keep your students engaged, but also prepare them mentally for the classes to follow and set the environment for upcoming interaction.
You can also involve them while doing the audio and video quality tests to keep them active. These pre-live sessions can be a useful time for teachers to connect with their learner community by sharing some relevant information about themselves and the community which will be beneficial especially for the new students.
Chat In Real-Time
Most virtual classrooms feature the functionality of real-time chat along with live training. You can make use of the real-time chat in your virtual classroom training to involve our students. Make sure you check on your students consistently using the real-time chat functionality.
Keep Focussed And Avoid Distractions
Before you begin your live training sessions, make sure you turn off your phone, email, and limit other distractions so that you can lead your class peacefully.
Set the guidelines on your live virtual classroom before you begin your sessions so that not just you, your students can also follow the guidelines.
By avoiding such distractions that can hamper the effectiveness of your live classes, you can ensure that you and your students are fully focused on the classes and don’t lose focus.
Log In At Least 15mins Before Live Training Session
Make it a practice to log in to your online classes at least 15 minutes earlier so that you will have adequate time to test your live setup.
Test your audio and video and other platform tools to make sure it functions properly. Being prepared before your students come will allow you to ensure the proper working of the setup and brush up the learning materials quickly so that you can deliver your classes effectively.
Enable Post-Session Training Support
Even if your online training is interactive for the participants, you still have to promote post-training to offer more support for your users in case they need it.
For example, you can send out transcripts of the class, questions, and answers after your live classes along with the resource and additional learning materials that were discussed.
Consider offering a link to your recorded class so that your students can revisit the points discussed in the class and retain key concepts.
Handle Unexpected Challenges
When running a virtual classroom, you must expect unforeseen challenges that might occur during live training.
For example, participants can get disconnected, disturbance in the audio background, distractions in the workspace, etc. can occur. Expert online tutors must be well equipped to handle these unexpected challenges.
Handle the situations gracefully by addressing the issues and try to return focusing on your classes as soon as possible.
If you are well prepared beforehand, you can devise an efficient backup plan for any unforeseen technology or other related challenges.
For example, if you get disconnected from the internet connectivity, make plans to switch to a backup provider. If a learning activity doesn’t work as they had planned, you must be able to respond with flexibility and switch to some other techniques.
In Conclusion
Live virtual classes are revolutionizing the way individual tutors and educational institutions deliver their classes to their audience.
With the sustained interest shown by learners across the globe and educators alike, it is expected that virtual classrooms will have a bright future and remain as a standard for global content delivery online. By applying the above techniques, you can effectively deliver the best virtual learning experience to your student base.
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