Hint: Physics holds the answer.

Last week, we talked about maximizing learner engagement during live classes by tapping into the Wisdom of the Crowd. When it comes to deep learning, live classes still have the edge. But we can’t ignore that a lot of learning takes place online both in real time and on demand, and both of those scenarios require different approaches.

People have been learning in real time and space since the first teacher scratched out a picture of a tiger on a rock and told the kids to avoid this animal. Online learning is a brand new medium. We are still learning what we can borrow from live classes and discovering places where we need to have new rules.

One of the biggest challenges in online learning is to keep the learner attending to the program while the distraction of email and temptation of Facebook are beckoning like sirens in their tray.

Beyond “Unmute Yourself”

Most webinars and online classes begin with a simple request: “Please close all your other windows and programs during this class.” It’s a good opening statement. I recommend you use it while you are going over the features of the software such as how to raise your hand and how to unmute yourself.

In addition to the obvious opening directions, a few delivery techniques can keep your learners engaged beyond the first few screens.  To make online learning more engaging, revise some of the rules you use during live classes.

Try these 3 tactics to keep your learners attending:

1. Get feedback. The common wisdom is that if you throw in a few slides with polls throughout the class, you can keep people awake. The reality is that if people are engaged and paying attention, they will participate. But polls alone won’t keep them with you. They are just a measure for you to find out if there are still lucid warm bodies on the other end of your Internet connection.

Feedback is more than a taking a poll, although polls can be very valuable when you use them to gather reaction to your content. When you use them to find out what your class knows, you can direct your presentation in response to gaps and misconceptions that you’ve uncovered. Beyond just finding out what is important to them, use polls, surveys and – yes, the comment box and the venerable microphone – to gather information about what your class understands about your topic.

Uncovering gaps and attitudes will help you provide valuable information. It goes beyond most polling questions that measure what percentage of the class “does this” or “plans to do that” or “prefers thus-and-such”. Find out what they know. After all, it is enlightening when you’ve asked a few questions into silence to find out that the people that have been asked to participate in your class don’t have the background necessary to understand the material. If you find gaps, you can make adjustments to explain difficult concepts rather than just plow through them while your students tune out.

Be concerned about silence and lack of comments. Your students may be bored and talking to friends on Facebook, or they may be in a class that is not appropriate for them and they are lost. Find out which it is and adjust your approach.

2. Keep your online learning to as little as 10 or 20 minutes whenever possible. We’ve adopted the one and two hour online class structure from live events. It’s just not a practical expectation for an online class given the demands on peoples’ time. When a learner is plucked from the work environment and sent to a training room for a morning, they are clearly present. When you ask them to click in from their cubicle or from home, how often do your hear dogs, kids or coworkers vying for their attention? I venture to say most of the time. Knowing this is a fact of life, ask for a small chunk of power-packed time and you are more likely to keep their attention.   Face it, our virtual attention spans are used to 140 characters, click and play, or multi-tasking. Those behaviors don’t change when the content is educational.

By keeping it short, you gain a few things.

First, you are more likely to have their attention for the full amount of content you want to deliver to them. Second, we learn better in small chunks. To pick up the pace of your online classes, schedule a few 10 or 15 minutes sessions and follow it with a half-hour roundup and Q&A session.

3. Provide more slide content. The last holdover from live training that can use an overhaul for online training is our approach to slide design. The live rule is that less is more when it comes to slide content. Some design approaches now recommend that slides have an image and one or two words, leaving the presenter to deliver all the content verbally. Certainly, slides packed with several hundred words of 12-point type are considered verboten in a live presentation.

In an online presentation, let me suggest that you consider the fact that light travels faster than sound. One of the reasons that webinars and online classes drone on for an hour or more is that we are adhering to the slide rule which is usually some version of no more than six words per line, no more than six lines per slide while most of the content is delivered verbally. This approach arose from the fact that very few people can read hundreds of words of agate type from the back of a conference room and concurrently listen to the speaker expound on said content.

Consider, however, that the online learner has the screen directly in front of them and they are staring at your slide with rapt attention (hopefully). Take advantage of this situation. In order to shorten your online delivery programs, both live and asynchronous, the solution is to speak less in an online presentation and give more content on the slide. You still need to avoid squeezing Ulysses onto one slide, but you can deliver an important topline and all the major points on one slide and be very effective. To understand the theory behind this, consider this scenario: when given an option whether to watch a 25 minute video speech or read a pdf transcript that takes maybe five minutes to breeze through, what do you do? Reading the material is a great way to get the same content much more quickly.

Apply this light travels faster than sound theory to your online class to shorten the time you take to deliver content. When structuring slides, place valuable topline points and second level detail on the slides because the learner is looking at the screen and taking in the written material while you are talking. You can make your points even more powerful by adding a few images to reinforce them. Remember, the online viewer is close up to your slide so you can add a few small image enhancements to even further deliver your message. When you speak over the content-rich slides, simply discuss the main points and add a little verbal color, linger a few seconds longer to allow the learner’s eye to find the relevant secondary information, and then move on.

Online learning is an emerging art. These are some observations and tweaks I have been making as I play with the genre. As you test some of these new approaches, refine what works best for you, your material and your learners. As always, the bottom line is respect for your learners and their time.