Online Training Best Practices

Online training is quite a different experience then face-to-face. For one, participants can easily wonder off, or get stuck with topics and feel they can't catch up.

We've done a lot of online training, and here are some things that we see work well:

• Limit the class to couple of hours, ideally up to three to roughly correspond to half days of regular training.
• Have a short break often, possibly at top of each hour. Limit it to 5-10 minutes max.
• We use GoToMeeting.com. It has zillion features just like WebEx and other tools do. BUT, try to limit its use to: screen sharing for you and chat window for users.
• Mute the users so there's no noise on the line. Have them ask questions at any point publicly via chat window. The reason for this is that a question one person has is a questions others likely also have.
• Make sure you are in a quiet room.
• VoIP is a single most common point of failure. Use telephone on your end. Suggest the same to users. Get a good phone so they can hear you. VoIP over the computer is just NOT reliable, will make your computer run slower, and if you drop off the line (e.g. your computer dies) you can't tell users that you are just rebooting.
• Learn certain features of GoToMeeting. Screen share and chat are essential to understand, but file sharing with users is another good one. You may write some code that you'd want to send to them.
• Use a tool such as OmniDazzle to visually communicate main points.
• Use relative time instead of absolute time (e.g. top of the hour versus 10AM). People are in different time zones than you are.
  

Hope this hels.
Marko

Ya really Online training is the best practice.Thanks for sharing such a post.

Excellent Tips. Thanks