Nearly a year ago, I started working with the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership to develop a training course for PhD students about blogging. We scheduled the first two sessions for the Spring, and of course, lockdown ended any hope of running in-person training. We optimistically booked a new set of sessions for October and as the date approached, it became clear that gathering in a classroom in Hampshire wasn’t going to be feasible.
I’m not going to lie, I felt so nervous at the prospect of attempting to run the session entirely online that I rather hoped for a second postponement. But of course, after 6 months of remote working, the team were keen to proceed so the students could benefit from the session sooner rather than later. So I found myself running two online workshops one Friday in October, and here’s what I found:
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I really did miss the personal connection you get in a room together. I love the immediate feedback you receive when engaging in person and the buzz you get when participants bounce ideas of each other.
And after spending months almost constantly in online meetings, I must confess I was surprised at how reluctant participants were to switch on their cameras. For the vast majority of the session I found I was presenting to nothing.
But… despite all that I actually really enjoyed myself and found I was really buzzing and motivated by the end of the day. And I think the students found it helpful (although I’m waiting for their feedback!).
So, what did I learn for next time?
#1 Keep it simple
When I realised I’d be delivering the 2-hour courses online, I started researching tools I could use, and planned a complex series of presentations, online polls and quizzes, breakout discussions and collaboration boards. But I quickly found that trying to operate them all was very likely to cause me technical challenges and I didn’t want to get flustered trying to switch between tools and platforms.
Instead, I pared everything back to some break out discussion sessions and some initial survey questions I asked in zoom. It made things much less stressful for me and allowed me to focus on the content itself. I did try one online collaboration tool, encouraging participants to add virtual post-its to an online wall - but I found it wasn’t really necessary. The students preferred to talk rather than spend time accessing a tool.
I also created a simple online resource for the participants so everything they might need was in one place. It saved me having to share lots of documents and URLs during the session and meant they had an easy to remember place to find the presentation slides, resources and links I was referring to.
#2 Don’t panic if there’s silence
Clearly with cameras off for most of the time, it wasn’t possible to get the immediate feedback you would get in person when I wanted to quickly check that the group understand something. And I initially panicked when I received tumbleweed silence after my first question - but I found that it just took the group a little bit longer to respond online, some choosing to use the chat or thumbs up emoji, and some taking time to unmute to answer.
#3 Create opportunities for interaction
It’s obviously hard to freely interact in large groups online, but I didn’t want the entire session to be talking at the group. I found that the students did use the chat in the main session to ask questions or respond to things I was sharing which was great, although they were more reluctant to raise their hand and talk.
I found the Zoom discussion rooms worked really well to enable the participants to discuss their blogging ambitions and ideas in pairs and small groups. I valued being able to send reminders in the chat to everyone - e.g. time notifications, reminders of what they were meant to be discussing etc (although with lots of small groups I had to rely on individuals contacting me if they needed help or had a question.)
#4 Choose the right location
One of my biggest concerns was whether my home wifi was going to make it through the day as it had been a bit unreliable in the weeks before the sessions. So I opted to go to an office space with much better infrastructure to ensure that my own network issues didn’t impact the session. It took a real element of stress out of the situation for me.
#5 Give the session enough time
I had so much material I wanted to cover during the session that it was a struggle to fit it all in without cutting into the group discussion time, and I found I had to rush towards the end. Some things took a little longer online - getting in and out of groups, switching on and off presentation mode - and next time, I’ll give myself a bit more breathing space to allow for
#6 Practice, practice, practice
I’m so pleased I built in some time before the day to practice running through everything - so I could confidently jump between presentation slides and group discussions, and so I was totally sure about the functionality of the tools I was using.
I’m not sure my husband enjoyed the evening we spent getting all our home devices to join an online zoom session so I could test out functionality for break out rooms (!), but I was so much happier on the day knowing exactly how I was going to run everything.
#7 Build in time for a screen break
Finally, we all know how tiring it is staring at a screen all day, so I made sure I created time for a proper screen break in the middle of the session. I specifically called it a movement break to encourage people to get up and walk around - myself included.
What have you learned from moving activity online?