How to Run a Virtual Classroom

Managing virtual classrooms requires a different approach to your learners, but by integrating some simple yet innovative tools, its easy to get started.

I hate e-learning, cried a top Silicon Valley chief learning officer. Her shocking remark opened a Sloan Foundation workshop at Stanford University in the Spring of 2011. Attended by some of the industrys most prominent learning executives, most echoed disenchantment with ubiquitous plug-and-play modules used by many Fortune 500 companies.

Today, innovative learning leaders are moving away rapidly from delivering isolating self-learning modules, turning instead to engaged, peer-to-peer electronic-mediated environmentsvirtual classrooms.

Why it works?

Mirroring and extending face-to-face instruction, virtual classrooms give employees the chance to participate in live or asynchronous discussions with facilitators and co-workers, interacting in creative, knowledge-building ways.

While self-learning modules depend entirely on employees absorbing text and graphical elements on their own, personnel in virtual learning environments are engaged with instructors and peers in real-time or through discussion threads. The key is active communication, building motivation and involvement, rather than merely absorbing facts or processes by rote.

Without adding a new line item in your budget and without entering negotiations with vendors, very likely, you can set up a virtual classroom at your company today, exploiting currently installed commercial software or freely available open-source applications.

If your company provides you and your co-workers with a learning management system (LMS), you probably have all the technical resources youll need. LMSs usually house discussion forums where instructors and employees can easily post text messages (similar to exchanges on a listserv). And if you have access to chat rooms and webinar tools, youre ready to run a virtual classroom at your company now.

Guidelines

Even without an LMS, you can run a stripped-down virtual classroom, just with email and teleconferencing. Or, if you're looking for more robust collaboration tools, search the web to download free groupware such as Drupal. Scaling-up with more sophisticated technologiesoffered by many companies as part of a learning suiteyou can introduce podcasts, video streaming, simulations, and, at the high end, the extraordinary experience of teleprescence.

Most interactive tools give you and your learners the ability to archive lectures, presentations, and even text discussions. Digitally captured, lessons can be revisited by those who may not have absorbed key points at first. Archiving also permits learners to check in afterwards to view recorded presentations they may have missed while away on assignment.

Its best to turn to your IT or training department to help you select the right communication tools. Of course some of these, email and teleconferencing for example, are commonly used, part of every workers routine practice, and naturally, do not require training. Others, with which you may be less familiar (chat, discussion forums, blogs, webinars, wikis, and social networks) may require some help to get you up and running.

If youre the instructor, the first thing youll want to do is post a welcome message; for example: Hi. My name is Jane Smith, and Im your instructor. At the start, its best to let everyone know what the course is about, how you plan to run it, how much participation you expect, and how often and when the class will meet in real time, either by teleconference, Skype, or webcasting.

When they log in, learners should immediately access a brief description of your course; topics and lessons divided into modules by day or week; and your expectations for participation in discussions, postings, homework, group and individual assignments, and tests, among other tasks.

Since most virtual classes never actually meet face-to-face, its helpful to post useful clues about who you are (your photo and your brief profile, especially). Its wise to encourage participants to post their photos and bios, too. It may seem counterintuitive, but learners in virtual classrooms say that they often grow closer to their peers online than in physical space, especially in corporate settings where everyone rushes off to the next assignment or to make a deadline. Weve all experienced the peculiar feeling of sitting next to a co-worker for an entire course and at the end not knowing anything about her, not even her name.

If you run it right, you can reduce, and even eliminate, what virtual-team experts Karen Sobel Lojeski and Richard Reilly call virtual distance, which is a consequence of a number of potentially alienating factorswide geographic separation and different cultural norms without a common standard of behavior. In Uniting the Virtual Workplace (Wiley, 2008), they say that building close relationships among workers at a distance is the single most important task.

Online, the most effective way of mitigating virtual distance is to stimulate peer-to-peer interaction. Assuming the role of facilitator in a text-based forum, you initiate discussion by posing a question about the topic being covered. If its on target, your question will generate a trickle of responses at first, followed by others who may chime in commenting on earlier posts, some disagreeing with previous conclusions.

Virtual discussions can start with just a seed and grow into a giant discussion tree, branching and twigging in many directions. Your job, as a guide on the siderather than a sage on the stageis to enter occasionally when you see things straying or when you detect false claims or errors of fact. Otherwise, its best to let participants learn from one another, expressing a wide range of opinion. At the close, say, at the end of the day or at the conclusion of a weeklong session, youll wrap things up succinctly, pointing out essential takeaways.

Results

Virtual classes take employees seriously, placing them at the center of learning, rather than at the periphery. Workers in virtual classrooms will be prepared for some of the most challenging experiences in modern corporate life. Apart from the content they need to know, as their jobs become more complex and demanding, they will learn how to engage with others using sophisticated communication technologies, and most critically, they will learn to act effectively in teams everywhere your company does business.