Anyone planning to design live virtual classroom programs should attend as many “free” LVC programs as possible in order to see different styles of facilitation and to observe the features such as whiteboarding, application sharing, and polling being demonstrated to best advantage. Good places to find calendars for upcoming live virtual classroom programs are the websites of vendors such as Lotus, WebEx, Centra, Interwise, and IntraCall. If you can’t find the time to attend in real time, you can often find a recorded session to watch in playback mode.

I recommend sampling programs at vendor sites because vendors have highly skilled facilitators capable of using the LVC tools to best advantage. The one drawback to free vendor-sponsored programs is the limited variety of instructional tactics demonstrated. Most of the free demonstration programs use the lecture format with some application sharing and polling. The following sections describe alternative strategies for using the live virtual classroom in other modes.

Tactics for the LVC can be divided into two groups: communication-based tactics and collaborative-based tactics. The two groups of tactics differ in their objectives and, more importantly, they differ in the degree of skill needed by both the facilitator and learners.

Communication-Based Strategies

Communication-based strategies are not considered “education” by many educators, but these tactics are well-suited to delivering awareness-level training. Communication- based tactics are good for making learners aware of facts, concepts, principles, and processes. For many organizations, communication-based tactics are an easy place to start. In some organizations, where traditional classroom objectives seldom get beyond “will be able to: identify, list, name, find, and cite,” communication- based tactics will offer a solution with as much depth as their physical classroom programs.. It should not be surprising that most of the communication-based tactics draw on the metaphor of television or radio. These tactics focus on communicating information and therefore draw their inspiration from proven models.

News Magazine

Like television news magazines such as “Entertainment Tonight” or “60 Minutes,” the LVC news magazine format has a host or co-hosts and features a series of fastmoving segments. The goal is to deliver information and, if needed, to motivate the audience to seek additional information by going to a website or enrolling in a course. One of the key advantages of using the news magazine format in the virtual classroom is the ability to interact with the audience via live questions and answers and to poll the audience for instant feedback. This tactic requires good scripting skills and a sense of pacing.

Talk Show

Again, the inspiration is drawn from TV, but guests on these training-sponsored shows are unlikely to appear on “Oprah” or “The Tonight Show.” The goals of this kind of program are to make a subject-matter expert accessible to learners and to communicate information. This might mean interviewing the salesperson of the year to learn best practices for prospecting or talking to the new CEO about a change in the strategic direction. In the live virtual classroom, the audience can be invited to send in questions in advance or interact with the guest by asking real-time questions. This format requires planning on the part of both the facilitator and the guest. The format may be talk show, but this is far more staged. Successfully communicating key points requires sharing the interview questions in advance. This can entail rehearsing or at least walking through the timing and transitions. It is also helpful to ask the guest for slides or graphics to support his or her responses. If the guest or SME knows what he or she wants to communicate, this is an easy program to produce.

Expert Panel

A variation on the talk show interview is a panel discussion. The goal of this tactic is to bring together a group of people to provide a broad perspective. This can be difficult to execute because the facilitator has less control. In the ideal situation, the panel would be well aware of the communication goal and, rather than simply agreeing with each other or restating the obvious, they would have differing and key insights to share. An example of this would be bringing in a panel made up of members of the customer service team to talk about the new call handling procedure. Each of the panelists would represent a different point in the process, be able to talk about his or her role, and add valuable comments relative to the other panelists. Strong facilitation skills are needed here to summarize the panel’s comments and to manage and direct audience questions to the right panel member.

Doctor’s Hours

This is a program that puts a recognized expert in front of the audience to answer questions and to solve problems. Technical audiences like this format because of its no-nonsense look and feel and the opportunity to see technical steps demonstrated.

The goal of this program is to make an expert available to answers questions that are too technical and too diverse to be addressed in a standard training program. This takes minimal skill to facilitate and it is easy to produce, but its success is dependent on the quality and volume of audience participation. It helps to ask the expert to provide two or three provocative questions and then to ask someone from the training staff to get the ball rolling by raising his or her hand and asking one or two of the expert’s questions. In technical realms this is very effective because application sharing can allow the expert to bring up an application and demonstrate the solution, or the expert can pass the controls to the caller and ask him or her to demonstrate the problem and then share controls as they fix the problem. This differs from the talk show strategy because the audience dictates what is discussed during the scheduled program. Another key difference is the notion of “doctor’s hours.” The idea is that participants come to the doctor and the doctor will cure their problems, and they don’t need appointments. Likewise, you don’t have to stay after you have been cured.

Game Show

This can be dicey territory—audiences either love this tactic or hate it. The odds that the audience will like a game show are better if the audience is American, but this is not guaranteed. The goal of the program is to communicate factual information in a playful and fun manner. The tactics are simply to modify familiar game shows such as “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” “You Don’t Know Jack” and “Lightning Fill in the Blank.” The reason for imitating these popular shows is that imitation saves you a great deal of time explaining the rules. The system for responding must be modified to fit the available LVC technology, such as hand raising, polling, and using chat to send questions to the instructors. Special attention must be paid to strategies that involve hitting the response button first, due to the unfair advantage some learners will have based on the speed of their Internet connectivity.

The game show format is far more challenging than it first appears. Writing the questions requires as much effort as writing multiple-choice questions because the questions must be well-worded, each question must have only one right answer, and the level of difficulty must be consistent. Like gaming strategies in traditional training, the transfer of knowledge may be low if the learners cannot readily understand how to apply the information in the real world.

Communication-based tactics discussed in this section focus on delivering a message. Because of their nature, these tactics lack educational elements such as structured probes to determine whether the audience understands what is being presented, an opportunity for practice, and a final assessment to measure mastery. Communication- based tactics also tend to address the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (1956).

Collaboration-Based Strategies

Collaborative learning is defined as a style of teaching and learning where students work in teams toward a common goal. It has been argued that collaborative learning is more effective than most other approaches because the learner who learns best is the one who organizes, summarizes, elaborates, explains, and defends. The learner who does the intellectual work, especially the conceptual work, learns the most (Johnson & Johnson, 1993). The following strategies rely on some form of collaborative learning or group work. These strategies have corollaries in the traditional physical classroom and in most cases the LVC simply changes the medium. In the best of instructional designs, the live virtual classroom environment lends itself to things that cannot be done in a traditional classroom, such as surf the Web to find resources as needed, support application sharing to do modeling, build a presentation in real time as a team, or link to experts who might be too busy to attend a real class but who would be willing to be part of an LVC for twenty or thirty minutes.

Case Study

This tactic is tried-and-true. It is a method for providing learners with an opportunity to apply concepts, principles, and practices to cases and then transfer that learning to real life. There are several ways to organize a case study, depending on the complexity of the topic, your resources, and the time available for delivery. The easiest way to do this is to provide a brief text-based case study as part of the live virtual classroom session. If the case study is more complex and requires learners to review numbers, tables, organizational charts, and financial statements, you may want to send the learners these items in advance. Focus the live virtual class time on discussions and case work. Draft a series of questions to guide the learners and highlight the key concepts and issues to be explored. If the LVC application allows breakout rooms, move virtually among the rooms to help clarify questions and keep the teams on track.

Action Learning

Action learning is a technique developed by Reg Revans (1980), a researcher at Cambridge University in the 1930s. In action learning, learners bring a real problem forward that must be solved by the learning group. The real problem must be an issue for which there is no known right answer. The problem must also be important enough to justify spending time solving it, have a deadline for resolution, and be significant enough that the solution will be implemented.

Action learning via the live virtual classroom allows learners from diverse backgrounds to come together easily. Because meetings do not place large demands for time and travel, managers can meet over an extended period of time to ask questions, design a solution, implement it, and reflect on the outcome. There is a need to acknowledge that action learning projects can take a great deal of time and that they should be part of a manager’s regular duties. This learning strategy requires an organizational culture in which solving a genuine business problem via this method is valued.

Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal teaching is derived from health education for low literacy patients. In the health care setting, learners (patients) are asked to “teach back,” that is, in their own words repeat or teach back the instructions for things like taking medication and modifying their diets. As the patient delivers a teach-back, the medical professional monitors and corrects if needed.

In the live virtual classroom, learners can be given greater responsibility for their learning using reciprocal teaching. They can be asked to do more than simply repeat what they have learned. The facts, concepts, principles, and procedures they have learned can be extended and applied by asking the learners to prepare a lesson, develop exercises, and even assess their peers’ understanding of what was presented.

The reciprocal-teaching method allows students to become the teachers and to more thoroughly understand and internalize information. The interactive tools in the virtual classroom, such as the ability to ask questions, give a quiz, take learners to websites with additional resources and to use rich media like graphics and video to illustrate facts, concepts, principles, and procedures, makes this a powerful strategy.

Modeling and Role Play

Live virtual classrooms allow learners to hear and to see—if your organization has the bandwidth—how things are done. Using this method, it is possible to teach language skills, interviewing techniques, listening skills, and other competencies that require hearing and seeing skills demonstrated. Modeling and role-play-based lessons should be done with small groups, allowing for frequent and active participation, practice, and coaching.

Designing modeling/role-play lessons requires attention to two dimensions of the lesson. The first dimension is the model or role-play activity, and the second is what those learners who are not modeling or role playing are doing. For example, consider a role-play scenario for a manager who has to conduct an interview. After teaching the interviewing concepts and procedures, learners are provided an interview scenario, characters, and the characters’ perspective on the situation. The learners then must act out the scenario as their characters and, in doing so, gain valuable experience in applying course concepts. The virtual observers should also have clear directions regarding what to listen for, and they should be expected to provide feedback and input on what they observed or heard. An LVC role play differs from a traditional role play in that the live physical aspects such as personal space and overall body language are not visible (most LVC systems are optimized for close-up shots of the learners’ face) and the observers are virtual.