Virtual Workshop Success Story
By Len Ferman
SUMMARY
The COVID-19 crisis has created unprecedented challenges for all organizations. Shock waves went through the education system in March as schools had to quickly migrate to remote instruction. I felt the pain as much as any professor. I teach a college and MBA class on business innovation that I created in 2014 at the University of North Florida. Over the years I have been repeatedly asked if I could teach my class online. Until the pandemic, I routinely replied it was not possible. I informed my department chairs and the dean of the business school that my class could only be conducted in person due to the highly interactive nature of the program I developed. But when the entire nation had to shut down it suddenly required me to leverage the innovation methods that I teach to devise a solution.
I am pleased to share in this article a small success story on how I enabled my class to continue in the virtual environment yet retain the key interactive workshops that are the cornerstone of the student experience. I did this by operating complex arrays of multiple ZOOM meetings all taking place simultaneously. Students serving as “meeting leaders” facilitated each meeting, while a “meeting guide” enabled all students to know which virtual room they should be in and move to during the workshops.
BACKGROUND
When I was invited in 2014 by the University of North Florida to develop a course on business innovation, in addition to being a great honor, it was also a unique opportunity to take everything I had learned in 25 years of managing innovation at Fortune 500 companies and produce something special. I spent several months conducting intensive research to verify my notions of what was important in teaching innovation and ensuring I was introducing the students to the most cutting-edge concepts in the field.
I decided that at the core of the course would be a group project in which students fictitiously innovate for a well-known company (e.g., Apple, Amazon, Tesla) so they could apply all of the principles and methods they would learn in my lectures. The centerpiece of the project would be several interactive sessions in which entire classes would be dedicated to certain aspects of the process that require group input. Over the years, as I further evolved the course based on student feedback, I reduced the number of lectures and added even more interactive workshop sessions. Students have repeatedly informed me that the most important learning that they retain from the course is via these workshops which I design to reinforce the key points in the innovation process.
FORBES WRITES AN ARTICLE ABOUT MY CLASS
Every semester I continue to put substantial energy into delivering a strong student experience and I was recognized for this effort in May 2019, when my course was featured in a Forbes magazine article:
THE CRISIS
One of the basic concepts I teach in the course is disruptive innovation. We study cases like Blockbuster vs. Netflix and try to understand the theory that the late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen so eloquently described in his seminal book, The Innovators Dilemma. Christensen explains that great companies often fail, despite doing what seem to be all the right things, when they are facing a disruptive challenge.
On the evening of March 11th the most disruptive event of our lifetime fully took shape. In one surreal hour I learned that the NBA had shut down their season, beloved actor Tom Hanks had tested positive for the virus, and the University of North Florida was moving all classes to remote instruction. This was the moment everything changed.
THE CHALLENGE
I had a problem. The student experience I had intended to deliver for the rest of the semester could not take place as planned. I had to quickly pivot. My mind was racing. I was determined to retain live sessions, and not simply send out taped lectures that lead students to feel disconnected. Classes could easily be delivered on ZOOM I thought. I had years of practice with video conferencing in the corporate world.
But how could I continue to provide the experiential learning programs that were central to the class? And how could I conduct a full class workshop online? I had three very different types of workshops scheduled to take place in the next few weeks.
The first workshop was called the Concept Cultivation Session. It was to take place during a single 75-minute class in just a couple of weeks, right after spring break. In this particular workshop the objective was for students to cultivate new product/service concept statements they had written. The workshop leverages a simple test/refine/test methodology. This iterative process is very powerful in producing concept statements that resonate with customers and is a key step to developing successful new products and services.
The Concept Cultivation Workshop was one of the students’ favorites in past semesters. What was I going to do? As an innovation professor, author, speaker and practitioner of the creative problem-solving process my inner voice was screaming at me: “brainstorm for solutions.”
THE SOLUTION
After considering many options, I decided that in the online environment the workshop would be divided into three distinct parts:
1. TEST – students share their concept with a group of students and receive feedback
2. REFINE – each student works on their own to refine the concept
3. TEST AGAIN – students share the refined concept with a new group of students
In order to conduct the workshop with 43 students I had to set up 20 separate ZOOM meetings which would consist of two sets of 10 meetings. Each meeting would have 4 or 5 students. To facilitate the 20 meetings, I recruited a group of students to be "meeting leaders." Meeting leaders had to schedule a ZOOM meeting per my instructions and send me the link to the meeting a few days ahead of time. They also had to review instructions on how to open and manage their meeting.
Once I had the links to the 20 meetings, I assigned students to each of the meetings based on several criteria I had for the session. Chiefly, no students from the same team could be in a meeting together as I wanted each student to have the experience of sharing their concept with students unfamiliar with “their client company.” These students could effectively pose as “consumers” for our workshop. And to ensure a fresh set of eyes reviewed the refined concept, the second meeting for each student had to consist of students that they had not already met with in the first meeting. With 43 students in the class I had to spend several hours plotting out a permutation that would work.
NOTE: for those of you familiar with some of ZOOM’s advanced features, I want to explain why I did not simply use the ZOOM breakout rooms. Breakout rooms randomly assign meeting participants to smaller group meetings. And although there is another advanced feature that enables you to assign specific participants to breakout rooms, I had found that this feature does not work well in real time. I could not take several minutes of workshop time to assign students to breakout rooms. Nor could I use the ZOOM feature to assign students to breakout rooms in advance. This ZOOM feature requires you to know with certainty the names with which students will sign into the meeting. Otherwise participants are left in a pool of unassigned rooms. I decided that I would not be able to coordinate with certainty for every student to log into the university system using their ID. Some students for instance are using borrowed equipment or have other unforeseen circumstances. And I needed to avoid this catastrophic scenario of a multitude of students being left unassigned when the clock was ticking on the 75-minute workshop. For all of these reasons, ZOOM breakout rooms were not an option.
I then developed a workshop schedule that required the students to adhere to a tight timeline as follows:
VIRTUAL WORKSHOP PREPARATIONS
On the days preceding the virtual version of the Concept Cultivation Workshop I was nervous about how it would function. I was relying on the students to adopt this new framework and follow all of the instructions. Even though I had successfully recruited the “meeting leaders” and they had done their job of setting up the ZOOM links, I did not have an opportunity to run a practice meeting with them. And as I sent out the email invitations to all students complete with a “meeting guide” displaying which workshops to attend, and at which time, I was afraid there could be mass confusion. Also, I couldn’t be sure students would be able to find and use the screen share function in ZOOM as I had instructed and displayed with screen shots in my meeting prep document. And even though I had prepared the military like time schedule shown above, I was concerned about whether 10 separate student led meetings could be administered effectively. And finally, I fretted about my role. Would I be able to easily roam around the virtual meeting place, popping in and out of meetings to monitor progress and answer questions? I wasn’t certain I would be able to provide the guidance necessary.
RESULTS
When the class started on Monday, March 31st at 6pm I felt like I had entered a new world. 10 different meetings were taking place and I was racing around virtual space to ensure each one had started as planned. After visiting the first few rooms I was pleasantly surprised to see meeting leaders stepping into a managerial role and directing the other students per the schedule. I also saw all of the students actively engaged in thoughtful discussions about the concepts they were seeing on their screens. And presenters were successfully using the screen share function as well as passionately describing their concepts.
From my perspective I was thrilled. And then I made an observation about myself. Hopping from meeting to meeting with a feeling like I was in mission control, I realized this was the most fun I had ever had in facilitating a student workshop. The highlight of the session for me came when a student texted me about an issue and using the meeting guide, I was able to identify in which ZOOM room the student was located and pop into their meeting in a matter of seconds to resolve the problem.
I was further delighted when I realized that the experience not only replicated the in-person workshop experience, but actually had some advantages. Students had the ability to see the concept statements right in front of them on their screens since each student used the ZOOM screen share function to display their concept. In addition, each meeting had a quiet conversation with a few students (the maximum in each meeting was 5) as opposed to students in person trying to huddle together in groups inside a large, noisy classroom. Finally, the overall quality of the final concepts students submitted were as good or better than concepts I've received from students in past semesters.
STUDENT FEEDBACK
Of course the ultimate measure of success would be the student experience. I asked each student to send me feedback after the workshop and I received overwhelming positive comments. Here is a sampling of the quotes from students:
"I refined my concept in many ways. I liked how efficient it was."
"It was good, it was easier to focus since there was only 3-4 (students) and not a whole classroom of conversations."
"It was very efficient."
"I liked the workshop through ZOOM, it went smoothly."
"It went well, liked how you gave us time to edit our ideas in between sessions."
"It was easy to use and the screen sharing was cool."
"I liked getting feedback from others on my ideas. Got some great info."
"I liked receiving feedback from people, it was very helpful with improving my concept."
"Very good experience."
It was personally gratifying to me to receive feedback that indicated I had created a positive learning experience for the students that was not compromised by the constraint to operate remotely.
I subsequently ran two more workshops later in the semester, each of which had a different format to meet the unique needs of the workshop objectives.
I would be happy to further discuss all of the workshop methodologies with other professors and meeting planners.
Finally, I’d like to share a little recognition I received from the University of North Florida which published a brief article about my successful online workshop.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Len Ferman is an adjunct professor at the University of North Florida where he teaches a course that he developed on business creativity and innovation. His unique teaching methods were highlighted in a Forbes magazine article titled, “How to Prepare College Students to Innovate.” In addition, he recently authored a college textbook, “Business Creativity and Innovation: Perspectives and Best Practices”, that was published by Cognella, and is in use at several universities and is also available on Amazon.
Len is also the founder and managing director of Ferman Innovation, a boutique consulting agency that helps organizations understand customer needs and generate and evaluation ideas for new products and services to improve the customer experience.
Prior to joining UNF and founding Ferman Innovation, Len spent 25 years with Fortune 100 companies managing customer experience research and innovation. Len led the front end of innovation at Bank of America and served as head of ideation. And he developed the Idea Tournament process to identify and select optimal concepts for development.
Len is also a faculty member with the American Management Association and a global educator for Duke Corporate Education.
Len graduated from Duke University with an M.A. in Economics and an M.B.A.
? Copyright 2020 Len Ferman