You sit at the front of a lecture hall. A presenter is at the front of the room, a computer projected on to the wall. The presenter clicks through a dozen workflows, narrating each one, showing where he clicks, pausing at certain moments to ask, “Any questions?” No one does. Thirty minutes pass and then forty, and, still, it’s just more watching and listening to someone show you how to do a lot of things in a particular piece of software.
You try to follow along, processing the work as you go and yet, you can’t quite keep up or you can’t quite figure out how the presenter got from one part of the screen to the other. The training is over. You walk out of the room, confident that you’ll not remember anything you just heard. You feel frustrated. Why did I spend time trying to learn this new technology right now anyway?
Sound familiar?
This is how almost every technical training has gone for me, at least when I’ve attended one as part of a larger group. I get that large technical trainings must happen, as they are an easy way to reach lots of people at scale. It’s the same reason that we often fall back on lecture when we teach anything: we want to distribute a lot of content quickly to the largest number of people possible. It’s not unreasonable.
But I’m always so struck by how ineffective every tech training is that I’ve attended because they can’t possibly reach everyone in the room. I’ve found that audiences for these large-scale tech trainings are often reluctant to ask questions because either 1. they’re overwhelmed and don’t know what to ask, 2. they don’t want to derail the presenter’s plan, or 3. they genuinely know what the presenter is sharing and they don’t have any questions to ask.
This is a pretty wide range of experiences and I am sympathetic to the challenge of reaching a range of people who may have different levels of comfort and exposure to a range of technologies. Again, it is a weakness of the lecture as a teaching technique: there is no way we are going to get everyone on the same page, and when the goal is to get everyone to feel more comfortable with using a particular tool or technology, it’ll be challenging for a lecture to accomplish that goal successfully.
My most meaningful tech training experiences have mostly been one-on-one conversations with experts or they’ve been self-paced lessons where I’ve worked through an online training course or watched “how-to” YouTube videos to teach myself to do something new. So, as someone who now finds herself teaching technical concepts and “how-to” tutorials often enough, I am left asking a big question:
How do I bring the best of personalized training in a particular tool to a large group so that the training can scale and reach as many people as possible?
Here are three ways I’ve managed to mix up the ways I’ve taught technical concepts recently, though I feel like I’m still learning the best methods. I hope these tips can be helpful for readers whose job it is to teach any kind of workflow, process, or “how-to” even if it’s not necessarily for a particular kind of software or hardware.
- Give the audience options for participation. When I attend a lecture-based training session, I often feel obligated to listen quietly and try to work along at the same pace as the instructor. I inevitably feel rather frustrated by that because I don’t always feel like I can keep up at the same pace OR I feel like I’m bored because I’m already working several steps ahead of the instructor. That said, I recognize that other audience members might find that the instructor is going at exactly the right pace for them. So, when I lead a training now, I give my audience options: I invite some audience members to follow along and listen to me while I invite other members to complete a hand-out I’ve designed for them. I support the use of an ePortfolio platform on our campus, Digication, and have created a “scavenger hunt” handout for new users to navigate through as a way to frame what they learn. Even just having the choice to listen or to work through a structured handout has, I think, improved engagement and satisfaction with these workshops.
- Create a short, screen-capture version of the instruction. When we listen to anything that is technically challenging, it can be hard to absorb all of the information at once. I like to create a short screen-capture version of the lesson so that audience members have the opportunity to re-watch the lesson and use it as I would a YouTube tutorial: a space to watch, pause, try, and then watch again at their own pace. I sometimes wish that I could “flip” all of my technical training in this way, but given the fact that I’m often working with students who want to talk in-person, I have received feedback that offering both in-person tutorials and virtual tutorials is the ideal combination. Plus, I find that creating the screencapture has the unintended benefit of helping me “tighten up” the content I deliver in-person (especially if I have enough foresight to create the video before the workshop!). I tend to create my screencaptures in Quicktime (I work on a primarily Apple campus), but I’ve also had success in Camtasia (a tool well worth paying for if you often create educational videos), Jing (if you want a free solution), and Screencast-o-matic (for another free solution).
- Create an anonymous Q&A space to review during deliberate, planned breaks in the instruction. If I’m delivering a technical talk in a synchronous (i.e. real-time format), I ideally like to have a Q&A space where participants can ask questions anonymously. Some audience members feel shy about raising their hands and volunteering a question out loud, so having a discussion forum space, a chat stream, or even a Slack channel for asking questions can offer audience members a powerful way to ask questions that you, as the presenter, can review either in real time or after the workshop is over. I like to give space for participants to “play” during a technical workshop anyway, so that’s often the time I’ll review and then answer questions. If you’re facilitating a technical workshop asynchronously (not in real time), however, another option might just be to host the Q&A forum in one of the aforementioned channels and respond to questions as they come in. Your workflow will vary depending on the structure of your asynchronous workshop, of course.
Even with these strategies, I still have some questions about how to make technical trainings more effective:
- How do I kick the boredom factor? How can technical trainings be more engaging? Having a clear purpose for learning the tool itself is, of course, critical, but sometimes that’s not quite enough to make a tutorial engaging. I would be curious to know if any readers here have suggestions for improving the “fun factor” of a tech training. Is there a gamification component that could be effective?
- How do I reduce feelings of potential overwhelm? I’ve had the experience of feeling like I can’t take in enough of the information during a technical training. As a designer, I’m wondering if readers have tips on ways that they reduce overwhelm for really technical concepts.
- How do I bring in alternative perspectives/alternative pathways without confusing the audience? Most tools have multiple pathways for completing particular operations. I would like audience members to feel like they could explore those various options, but I also don’t want to offer too many different pathways. What are some good ways to make audience members aware of these pathways without also feeling confused by them?
It’s been a busy quarter for me of thinking through issues like this, but I’m hoping to get into a more regular blogging habit now that we’re already a full month into 2019! I hope that all of you out there are enjoying some cool new teaching experiences this winter.