One of the unexpected positive impacts of the coronovirus pandemic is the increased use of remote virtual classrooms.
For more than a decade, we have been using, revising, and improving training webinars. We have created interactive Live Online Learning Activities (LOLAs) with the main purpose of preventing remote classrooms from becoming electronic episodes of death by PowerPoint.
Debriefing LOLAs
There are different types of LOLAs that serve different purposes. Debriefing LOLAs enable you to reflect on an online activity, come up with insights, and share them with each other. Here are five examples of debriefing LOLAs.
The Most
This debriefing LOLA transforms passive webinar presentations into active learning sessions. Stop your presentation from time to time in approximately 5-minute intervals. Tell the participants to recall what they heard, review their notes, and type a single sentence that identifies the most important learning point. Review and discuss these sentences. Next, ask the participants to type a sentence that identifies the most useful point. Repeat the review procedure. Continue your presentation for another 5 minutes. Repeat the review interludes with different criteria such as the most unexpected point, the most complex point, or the most logical points
Likert Polls
Generate a list of positive or negative feeling words associated with an online roleplay or experiential activity. Create a poll with one of the feeling words using this format: How much of this feeling did you experience during the activity? Use these five alternatives as poll items:
not at all
slightly
moderately
considerably
extremely
Ask the participants to secretly select one of these alternatives. Keep the results hidden. Instruct the participants to type individual predictions of the top two alternatives. Reveal the results and congratulate the participant whose predictions were the closest to the actual results. Repeat the activity with the other feeling words.
Got a Question
Create a set of open-ended questions that are related to an online activity. Here are some examples:
As a result of your experiences in the online activity, how would you change your behavior in the workplace?
What would have been the difference if the activity lasted for a longer time?
How could you have increased the level of cooperation among the participants?
What is the important insight you got from the activity?
What word best describes your emotional reaction to this activity?
Present one question at a time and ask the participants to type their answers in the chat area. Encourage the participants to type more than one response if they want to. Review these responses and comment on them.
Men and women
This activity enables you to find out how different subgroups of participants react differently to the same online activity. Ask a single open-ended question such as What was your primary reaction to this activity? Ask the participants to type their responses and make them visible only to the facilitator. Separate the responses from men and women among the participants. Next, ask the men to predict what would be an answer from any women. Announce which prediction matched the most frequent response from the women. After a brief discussion of this response, ask the women to type their predictions of the most frequent response from men. Repeat the discussion procedure.
Slogans
Ask the participants to reflect on the earlier online activity, think of the lesson they learned from it, and come up with a slogan that calls for the application of this lesson. Ask the participants to secretly send the slogan to the facilitator. Select five of these slogans and read them one at a time. Ask the participants to decide which one was the most inspiring and memorable one. Read the slogans again and ask the participants to raise their hand (or type Yay! in the chat area) when they hear their choice. Identify and congratulate the author of the most popular slogan.