For the past 5 years, we have been experimenting with increasing and improving interactivity in virtual classrooms. Here’s a brief introduction to five of the LOLA (Live Online Learning Activity) that form the core of our approach.
First Five LOLAs
Here are brief descriptions of five types of LOLAs: structured sharing, thought experiments, interactive storytelling, instructional puzzles, and interactive lectures.
1. Structured Sharing
Structured Sharing activities encourage the participants to generate their own training content and to process them collaboratively. These activities ensure effective recall and application of relevant information.
Respond and Predict is an example of a structured sharing activity. Here’s a sample play of this activity that begins with this open question: “Why are most training webinars so b-o-r-i-n-g?” The participants are invited to send responses to the question by setting their text chat area to be visible only to the facilitator. After a suitable pause, the participants are asked to reset their text chat box to be visible to everyone and to type their prediction of what response would be the most frequent one. After another suitable pause, the participants are asked to provide the reasoning behind their predictions. The facilitator now reveals the top five high-frequency responses from the participants in this session and in earlier session where the same activity was used. The participants are invited to score the accuracy of their prediction.
The training rationale for Respond and Predict is to encourage the participants to think deeply about the topic in the open question. Initially, they think about their own reaction. In making the predictions, they put themselves in the place of their cohorts. In coming up with the explanation, they think more deeply not only about their response, but also about the reasoning behind their response.
Respond and Predict is a framegame. You can use it as a template for generating online learning activities simply by changing the opening question to relate to your training topic.
2. Thought Experiments
Thought experiments involve individual participants undertaking cognitive exercises that involve guided visualization, generating and comparing alternatives, and imagining what-if scenarios. The activity is followed by a suitable debriefing discussions and explanations of relevant principles by the facilitator.
Here’s an example of thought experiment called the Green Monkey with the training objective of reducing obsessive rumination. The participants are asked to spend the next 60 seconds thinking about anything they want, except about green monkeys. (Try this thinking exercise right now, if you want to. I can wait.)
At the end of the minute, the facilitator starts a debriefing discussion. The participants discover the key point about thought control: The more you try to control your thoughts and action, the more you are tempted to indulge in them. The facilitator asks the participants to suggest strategies for overcoming obsessive thoughts and comments on participants’ responses. The facilitator steers the conversation toward evidence-based though controlled techniques of focused distraction (example: concentrating on solving several sudoku puzzles), postponement (example: “I will think about this thing nonstop for 30 minutes after 5 PM”), acceptance (example: “Let’s face it. I cannot think of anything other than green money, and that’s okay.”), and paradoxical therapy (example: Let me wallow in these thoughts right now and think without any attempt at control).
You can design your own thought experiment to support your training objective. The psychological literature is full of suitable experiment. Here is a thought experiment for you: Think how your participants would feel when they complete your first thought experiment activity.
3. Interactive Storytelling
Unlike traditional storytelling in which the facilitator tells a story and the participants passively listen to it, interactive storytelling involves active participation from the listeners. The participants create and share their own stories or they listen to the facilitator’s story and analyze it, deconstruct it, change it, condense it, expand it, discuss it, and interact with it in many other ways.
Here’s an example of an interactive storytelling activity called Debriefed Stories. The facilitator tells a story that incorporates principles related to the training topic. The participants listen attentively. At the end of the story, the facilitator asks a series of questions to encourage the participants to reflect on the story, gain useful insights from the story, and share these insights with each other. The participants conduct this debriefing discussion through the text chat area.
Coming up with a story that has the theme, setting, and characters reflecting the training topic is the key success factor for designing and using interactive storytelling.
4. Instructional Puzzles
Instructional puzzles provide engaging previews or reviews of the training content. You can use appropriate puzzles involving numbers, words, graphics, or lateral thinking as intriguing training tools.
Here’s an example of an instructional puzzle called Number Series. The participants are presented these numbers and asked to come up with the next one in the series:
1, 4, 7, 10, ?
They accomplish the task fairly easily. The facilitator comments on the power of pattern recognition and presents the next puzzle:
3, 5, 9, 17, ?
This puzzle takes some more time to solve. During the debriefing, the facilitator points out that a pattern can be explained in more than one correct way and presents the next series:
8, 5, 4, 9, 1, ?
After few minutes of frustration, the facilitator points out that these are single-digit numbers arranged in alphabetical order (if written out in English). The learning point that is brought out during the debriefing is the importance of trying out new approaches rather than complacently staying with the approach that successfully worked in the past.
With suitable exploration and experimentation, you should be able to come up with instructional puzzles that suit your training needs and participant preferences.
5. Interactive Lectures
Interactive lectures involve the participants in the learning process by having them ask questions and make responses before, during, and after a lecture presentation.
Here’s an example of an interactive lecture called Mixed-Up Sentences. The participants listen to a lecture on the Ziegarnik Effect. At the end of the 10-minute presentation, the facilitator display six sentences, purportedly summarizing the key points from the lecture. The participants review this list and perform the following tasks:
- Identify an incorrect sentence that contradicts something that presented during the lecture.
- Identify a superfluous sentence that deals with a point not presented in the lecture.
- Supply a sentence that summarizes a key point presented in the lecture but left out of the list.
Mixed-Up Sentences is another template for the rapid design of a training activity. All you need to do is to come up with a list of summary sentences that contains an incorrect statement and a superfluous statement—and leaves out one or more key points.
Five More LOLAs
Here are brief descriptions of five more LOLAs: instructional magic, textra games, case method, ABLA, and optical illusions.
6. Instructional Magic
The Internet displays an increasing number of magic tricks that could be used in virtual classrooms. We frequently use these tricks, not to bemuse or amuse the participants but for helping them explore a variety of training topics, including process mapping, critical thinking, systematic observation, and performance coaching.
In a piece of magic called the Psychic Card Trick, we display six random playing cards on the screen and ask each participant to mentally select one of them. We then claim to pick up these cards, shuffle them and deal them again, five cards face up and one face down. We invite the participants to scan the new display. Every one of the participants claim that the card he or she mentally selected is the only card turned face down!
After a suitable pause, we reveal how this magic effect is achieved. We explain that we did not fool them but their own brains fooled them: Once they mentally selected a card from the original display of six cards, that card becomes the figure while the five others become the ground. The brain focuses on the selected card with an obsessive intensity and ignores the other five cards. The brain also makes certain incorrect assumptions to fool itself.
We use the Psychic Card Trick to demonstrate key principles from perceptual psychology and to emphasize the potential limitations of observation as a data-gathering strategy.
You may use this and several other similar magic tricks to spice up your virtual classroom sessions and to make them more interactive.
7. Textra Games
Textra games add extra instructional value to text materials. This type of activity primarily requires the participants to read a passage and strengthen their understanding by participating in an activity. For example, they may respond to different questions and share these responses. In general, we use short reading assignments contained in a single slide in our live online sessions.
Here’s an example of textra game (called Headlines) that we recently used in a virtual training session on change leadership. We began by presented a short piece of practical advice on the screen:
Avoid initiating your change campaign with a big kick-off. Instead, sponsor pilot projects that create a buzz.
We asked the participants to focus on the core idea in this message and type a suitable heading. We encouraged the participants to make this heading both memorable and meaningful. We also suggested that the participants may explain why their suggested heading is superior to the others.
Headlines is only one of several different textra games. You should have no difficulty coming up with other activities to entice the participants read text materials and process them in different ways.
8. Case Method
A popular teaching technique in business schools, the case method can be used as an effective training tool in virtual classrooms. The basic procedure involves the participants processing the case material that is presented in an audio, video, or text format.
In a recent live online learning session on rapid instructional design, we used an activity called Principles to Practice that began by our by presenting these four principles of rapid instructional design:
- Let the inmates run the asylum. Empower the participants to locate, generate, and process the content through collaborative activities.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel. Repurpose the content that is already available. Use activity templates that have been already field-tested.
- Build the airplane while flying it. Design training while delivering it.
- Mix it all up. Combine, omit, and re-sequence the steps in the instructional design process.
We asked the participants to keep these four principles in mind as they listened to a case study about the design of a leadership-training course. At the end of this narration, we recalled one of the four principles and conducted a poll in which the participants chose among these alternatives:
- This principle was not used in the instructional design case study.
- This principle was slightly used in the instructional design case study.
- This principle was moderately used in the instructional design case study.
- This principle was heavily used in the instructional design case study.
Before displaying the results of the poll, we invited the participants to type in an explanation of why they chose what they chose. We repeated same polling procedure with each of the other three principles.
In a live online session, you can use the case method using different media and different types of activities.
9. Assessment Based Learning Activity (ABLA)
Assessment-Based Learning Activities (ABLA) require the participants to respond to a test, a rating scale, a survey, or a questionnaire and receive feedback about their personal competencies, attitudes, or personality traits. The facilitator conducts discussion among the participants and provides additional just-in-time training.
We conducted a recent live online training session on building trust in the workplace. The main point we wanted to get across is that trust is not a unitary concept that can be measured quantitatively. Instead, trust differs qualitatively among different factors. For example, you may trust your dentist’s competency but not her predictability in terms of her schedule.
In the online session, we presented five different items from a trust questionnaire, one item at a time. Here’s the first item:
I genuinely care about the other person’s well being.
We asked each participant to think of a colleague in the workplace and respond to the item using the following 5-point scale:
- Never
- Rarely
- Sometime
- Often
- Always
We asked the participants to write down the appropriate number on a piece of paper, reassuring that they do not have share their responses with anyone else. We then pointed out that this item refers to the concept of selflessness as a trust factor. We gave them a couple of high-trust and low-trust behaviors related to this factor and invited the participants to type-chat other behaviors related to the same factor. We then asked the participants to reflect their level of trustworthiness on this factor and come up with personal strategies for increasing the frequency of selfless behaviors.
We repeated the procedure of presenting an item (related to the factors of predictability, authenticity, relatedness, and competency), asking personal ratings of the frequency of this behavior, generating examples, and brainstorming strategies for improving their trustworthiness.
We have used several variations of ABLAs in our online sessions. For example, we ask the participants to take a lengthy questionnaire online and help them interpret their scores during the virtual classroom session. We have also used a series of true-false items to diagnose the participants’ understanding of cultural variables and provided remedial explanations to reduce serious misconceptions.
10. Optical Illusions
Optical illusions provide attention-getting visual metaphors for key concepts and principles.
We use the Kanizsa Triangles illusion in our virtual training session on skepticism. The concept we want to explore is patternicity, a word coined by Michael Shermer: The brain has an amazing pattern recognition ability. It processes a few bits and pieces of information and makes total sense out of them. Working intuitively and rapidly, the brain connects the dots to guess the complete picture. This instinctive pattern recognition ability provided an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors by making them proactively run away from saber-toothed tigers when they heard rustling in the forest. Unfortunately, pattern-recognition also leads to self-deception, superstitious behavior, and conspiracy theories.
During the online learning session, we present a graphic of the Kanizsa triangle. We ask the participants to type what they see. Most participants see two triangles, a white one on top and another triangle with black sides. We point out that these triangles don’t actually exist. All we see are three black circles with missing segments (like the Pac-Man character in the video games) and three v-shaped lines arranged in different angles. Patternicity help our mind makes up the triangles.
We debrief this illusion by asking the participants to come up with examples of patternicity in the real world, especially in the workplace. The participants have no problem generating several examples of hasty generalizations. We then ask them to type potential negative outcomes of this cognitive ability. Finally, we ask the participants to type different ideas for removing or reducing the negative consequences of patternicity.
Three Principles
There are many different types of LOLA. Here are three underlying principles about LOLAs:
- There are different types of LOLAs. So there is no excuse for making our virtual training sessions passive and boring. Nor do we have an excuse for repeatedly using the same type of activity.
- Each type of LOLA includes different activities. For example, there are 30 different types of interactive lectures.
- The structure of each activity can be used as a template to explore different topics: For example, the Headlines activity can be used in conjunction with pieces of practical advice on a variety of soft skills.
Use a series of LOLAs to make your next training webinar come alive!