Elearning companies in the US have been quite instrumental in the pandemic. Its because the workers started doing their work remotely, which had an impact on the learning strategy for companies. Employee training has assumed so much priority to reduce absenteeism caused by a lack of work-related skills.

The training delivery is a tough decision for companies because they have to hire facilitators’ for virtual instructor-led training (VILT).

However, apart from using facilitation, such training can be made more interesting in the following ways. 

A very important technique used in this regard is the breakout groups. It leads to a higher user engagement because the learners are assigned to groups during the video conferencing call. The group is then given a challenge they have to tackle. For creating breakout groups, the host needs to send an invite to the participants. If they decide to click on Join, they become a part of the breakout group.

Break out Rooms

Breakout Rooms are useful so that participants are segregated into groups, where the host can see only the room screen instead of their individual member’s screen. The participants in such breakout rooms can see each other’s screens and chat about a topic. The host of the video-conferencing call only has the option to close or open such rooms or he/she can set a timer for the rooms to be closed. So when you want to see each participant’s screen and address them for the consecutive lesson, it’s important to close a room.

Such virtual groups help participants get unusual ideas through brainstorming sessions. Brainstorming is useful when you want to get unique ideas from team members who belong to different departments because they might have a distinct opinion about the work.

Another engaging brainstorming method is co-annotation. 

Interactive brainstorming session with co-annotation in Zoom

Zoom has an Annotate option where you can draw and write as much on your screen or their screen while the participants are watching you. Although the participants can’t write on such a shared screen without co-annotation, you can write on their behalf, their ideas during a brainstorming session. For example, you can open a Word document on your screen and click the share screen option and then Annotate. Instead of opening a word document; you can click on the share screen option and then click on the Whiteboard. You can decide the annotation preferences, whether the other participants in the group will be able to write on the whiteboard screen, by clicking on the Enable/Disable Annotation for Others settings in Zoom call. The feature to let other participants Annotate on the shared screen or on the whiteboard is only possible for all participants or for none at all.

You can also see who is annotating by enabling the show/hide names of annotators option.

There are many annotation tools present like drawing, spotlight, eraser, select an annotation. Under the spotlight feature, when you drag your mouse to a certain part of the screen, it is shown to other participants.

This is how you can make VILT more interesting.