You’re struggling to keep your virtual audience engaged. What are some tools that can help?

Polls and surveys are an excellent way to keep learners engaged at regular intervals throughout any live training event. Quizzes, trivia, and icebreakers are ways to gamify the experience and can even help learners make connections with their peers. Polls and surveys encourage learners to actively add their perspective, which encourages greater buy-in. Most importantly, virtual tools that encourage (or require) interaction are key to holding a learner's short attention. How often do you need to encourage or require interaction? Every 3-5 minutes.

Keep your virtual audience engaged. Channel your inner game show host. Your favorite game shows use polls and surveys to captivate viewers. Leverage these tools to combat virtual distractions. Uncover what your audience wants to know, craft polls, and adapt on the fly. The results? A dynamic conversation that transforms audience perception can make a huge difference. Let's turn virtual engagement into a winning game.

Polling Tools: Mentimeter: Create live polls, quizzes, and interactive presentations to engage your virtual audience. Poll Everywhere: Collect real-time feedback and responses through polls and surveys during your virtual sessions. Interactive Whiteboards: Miro: Collaborative online whiteboard platform for brainstorming, ideation, and visual collaboration. Jamboard (by Google): Digital whiteboard for interactive discussions and visual collaboration. Gamification Platforms: Kahoot!: Create and play interactive quizzes and games to make learning or presentations more engaging. Quizizz: Gamify your virtual sessions with interactive quizzes and polls.

- Divide responsibility for presenting topics among the participants. - Encourage participants to share ideas and thoughts via the chat function. - Schedule periodic check-ins with key participants. - Introduce periodic break-out room discussions

The ways in which to engage a virtual audience are to do what you would do in person...ask open questions, point them in the direction of someone in the room. Acknowledge their input and ask 'other name' to build on that. E.g. 'That's an interesting perspective, Mark, who else has had to handle the issue in the way Mark has?' etc. I find that this doesn't happen on webinars as these are a passive learning experience. A virtual classroom session however, can be highly interactive and engaging with a strong facilitator who is a great group coach as well as a tutor / teacher on the chosen topic. This approach, combined with strong content, breakout rooms and whatever additions such as polls, kahoot etc. make for a highly engaging session

Place persons in breakout rooms with 2 from the very start of your session, to introduce themselves to each other. It breaks the ice and sends a clear message that this will be a participatory and engaging session. Placing people in pairs kind of forces them to speak and be present during the virtual event. Keep using small breakout rooms throughout your session if you are able to.

Engagement as a facilitator is a skill that all excellent facilitators will have. Online, will have different dynamics than classroom, and here breakout rooms play a big role. As a simple thumb rule, see if you open a breakout room every 30/40 minutes, for an activity, for reflective work, for skill practice, for discussions, etc. Whiteboards, surveys, etc are also fine, if used for a purpose. Storytelling will play a part here. Open conversations with participants, questions, etc are key as well. Voice tone variations, and putting participants in a specific state, curious, joyful, thinking, reflecting also is key to engagement. Splitting statements, use of undeniable statements as a facilitator enhances engagement, and rapport.

Breakout rooms are so valuable to deepen your conversations. Plus, it helps to reset the floor by providing more activities and dynamism of your online sessions.

Before putting people into breakout rooms, share a clear outline of what people will be talking about when they get there. Keep the steps simple so people remember once they enter the rooms. When instructions are too complicated, I've seen groups spend more time figuring out what they're support to talk about, than talking about it. While random groupings work in many situations, it can also be useful in some situations to curate groups to ensure you're cross-pollinating teams an levels of hierarchy to get a wider range of perspectives into the conversation.

Breakaway rooms always work for me. I group my delegates with diversity in mind and give them a very interesting I've breaker to introduce themselves to each other and describing what they like mostly about their cultures. When they come back, they all smiling wanting to share what their colleagues said. It creates an amazing platform to get started.

Visual tools and annotations make it a bit more interesting as well as memorable and collaborative. Use colours to brighten it up and brighten icons and visuals, and images.

I recently collaborated with people in some remote training classes using Miro and Mural and found them to be so engaging and super useful! It feels like there are endless possibilities for what you could do with them with a team.

Visual aids are always helpful in spotting the trends of the crowd as well as drawing out some of the shy participants who may not feel comfortable voicing their opinions.

Open a free white board to collect introverts opinions. On a visio or IRL some people take the stage and the rest of your audience start to disconnect. Create tools like this would allow introverts to participate.

Open a whiteboard screen and let students collaborate and share. Use sticky notes to draw and paste icons. images. Let the class be creative

Play is the number ONE motivator.... everyone loves to rediscover the creative and spontaneous child within and trophies help, especially when assigned to a team.

Quizlet and Kahoot are also amazing tools for both in-class and virtual settings. The team mode on Quizlet is great for collaboration and content mastery. Kahoot is just an amazing tool to infuse fun and engagement in almost any setting

Who doesn't like games, and who is not looking for appreciation? I love to play games in class, just to remove the monotony or to make the classroom a learning place. At the end of the day, all of us look forward to a well-done message. This encourages the competitive spirit but a healthy one

Gamification can inject enthusiasm into your online sessions. You can create challenges, quizzes, or competitive activities to encourage active participation. Adding rewards like virtual badges or points can motivate participants to get more involved. Ensure clear objectives are set and rewards are distributed fairly. Gamification can also be used to enhance learning by turning complex subjects into interactive games.

Gamification is a powerful tool to make good training better. However, if the material and content presentation is bad, gamification won't change the overall bad experience learners are having.

People often speak about the importance of "breaking the ice" early in a meeting. In my experience, melting the ice by talking small engagement steps is more important. The chat is a great opportunity for this, because once you successful get people to contribute something in the chat, it is easier for them to speak later on. It's like a staircase where you gently want to lead people through.

The chat is great so that the speak is not constantly interrupted and also for the introverts or the ones that for whatever reason don't want to speak up they may feel more included if you also provide this channel. In this case you may need a dedicated person to keep an eye of the chat and read out the comment.

Chat is fabulous for those that may be afraid to speak uk. It allows everyone a voice. A good leader consistently reviews the chat and calls out those that made noteworthy contributions. Chat also allows for the leader to gauge understanding and answer questions. And emojis are a great way to visually see the temperature of the room. Not to mention they are so fun! Who didn’t love a flying, sparkly heart?? ??

Picture this: you ask participants where they're joining from. As they answer in the chat, colored dots appear on a world map that you're screen-sharing - visualizing their real-time responses in the Zoom (or Teams or Google Meet) chat. Welcome to chat-powered engagement. A key ingredient towards great virtual facilitation is how the session swings between the monologue-dialogue axis. Many of the tools discussed are helpful in catalyzing dialogue. However, requiring participants to install an app or go to another website is all friction. Use the chat as much as possible since it is already being used by participants. And to liven things up, use a tool like StreamAlive to visualize the chat (disclosure: am a co-founder)

A note of ? caution...I have seen chats taken a life of its own whereby it is no longer relevant to the presenter's topic. The audience were chatting on other topics and were no longer paying attention to the presenter. So, establishing ground rules on keeping the chat relevant upfront is a way to circumvent this.

Pre and Post surveying is an excellent way to gauge what type of experience your learners had with your virtual course. While a quick survey following the virtual interaction or course won't tell you how much information the learner has retained over time or how they're applying new skills and knowledge in their everyday role, it can help shape future sessions. "Reaction" (Level 1) surveys can also indicate how engaged and satisfied your learners are with the time they spent in your session. Finally, surveys are a way to encourage reflection, which can remind the learner to take the next step and continue on their journey to new skills and capabilities.

Feedback ist ein gro?artiges Instrument, um Interaktionen im digitalen Raum zu f?rdern. Auf diese Weise erh?ltst du nicht nur ein besseres Gefühl für die Gruppe, sondern kannst auch herausfinden, welche weiteren Interaktionen du einbauen kannst. Es gibt verschiedene M?glichkeiten, Feedback zu erhalten. Du kannst gezielt Teilnehmende aufrufen und sie nach ihrer Meinung fragen. Alternativ dazu k?nnen sie im Chat abstimmen, und du kannst auf ihre ?u?erungen reagieren. Pers?nlich bevorzuge ich den direkten Austausch mit der Gruppe, da ich so ein besseres Gefühl für meine Zuh?renden bekomme.

Feedback and evaluation are crucial for assessing the effectiveness of your virtual sessions. Use surveys or questionnaires after the session to gather feedback on participants' experience. Analyze this data to identify areas for improvement. Also, consider participation statistics such as engagement rates to gauge the success of your sessions. Use this information to adjust your approach and offer a more enriching experience in the future.

Have pink hair, infectiously high energy and a genuine desire to connect with the participants. Works well for me- to the extent people feedback its better than in-person training!

Story. Tell an engaging, relevant story. Tell it with passion and enthusiasm. Keep it short, simple and relatable. Make sure the key takeaways are practical and realistic. Avoid unnecessary polls, games and other interaction for the sake of interaction. Know your audience, and tell a story that will help them solve an important problem.

All of the above are great (breakouts, polls, etc)!!! But the most important ingredient in my experience so far is “being present”. This means you listen to & engage authentically with the participants, ready to be situationally fluent, ask them real questions that matter - customize in the moment. Each group of participants is different and by being present you ensure you stay relevant and give them the best experience they need.

Another thought to keep in mind is don’t be afraid of there being a little silence during a virtual presentation after a question is posed or provocative statement made. The silence could be people formulating their thoughts and comments. Some say you should give people about 7 seconds to respond during a virtual meeting before forging on to the next topic. Also, remember to remind people they can use the chat to comment as well. I have found it particularly helpful to engage someone (or a few people) in advance to help monitor the chat. This leads to the next thought. As much as you can, give a “teaser” about the topic so ideas can start percolating ahead of the virtual gathering. Engagement can be promoted by different approaches.

Some virtual sessions use VR which is great and inspirational. I like the idea that there is a theme virtual space where you can go and explore.