Giving My First Virtual Analytics Training During the Dutch Lock-down
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It was Friday the 13th and I was almost out the door to deliver Day 4 of an Analytics Translator training at the University of Amsterdam. I somehow hadn’t connected the dots that the university closings announced the previous evening meant that my training was cancelled until, by force of habit, I glanced at my emails and saw that the full-day training I was scheduled to teach was also, most definitely, cancelled.
The following days were a back-and-forth discussion with the participants (one of whom had since returned to Hong Kong) about how to reschedule. Most preferred trying a video training and finishing their certifications as soon as possible. This would mean giving the training virtually. Given the time zone challenges, we decided to split the full-day training into two half-days. As organizers, we had a secondary motivation that two half-days would give us two chances to master the technical challenges. This turned out to be a wise choice.
And so began preparations for what would be my first virtual training (one of many firsts experienced during the Dutch corona virus lock-down).
By now we’ve all been subjected to remote meetings using the myriads of available conferencing tools. I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with many of them (UvA happens to use Zoom). If you’ve ever struggled to simply join an existing meeting, you can imagine how much more pain is involved in mastering the intricacies required to schedule and run a four-hour virtual training.
I won’t go into the details of how to use Zoom (there are manuals and videos for that) or camera placement (Dave Pond of linkedin recently poste a short video on that), but I would like to share some of the learnings I had in the context of giving my first virtual training.
Preparation Stage
I must have spent as much time preparing the technology for the first video training as I did actually giving that training.
Physical setup
I wanted to add two external monitors, but my new windows surface laptop had only a single USB-C port, and the Dell USB-C hub I’d ordered turned out to not support two external monitors. I arranged the two with the camera centered. I’ve added a photo to also illustrated the arrangement of the software windows (described below).
I brought in my high-end blue yeti microphone and my Logitech spotlight presenter, a very cool device to highlight or magnify parts of the screen as you cast. You can also see the disappointing Dell USB hub next to it.
Software setup
Big question was the video background. I was working from a spare bedroom; a passable backdrop, but not ideal. Many conferencing tools (Zoom included) allow you to substitute an artificial background. I’ve seen people use beach or mountain backdrops, but I wanted something realistic and professional.
A few minutes searching online brought me to an office background that seemed realistic. At this point I realized that the algorithm that leaves your head but replaces your background is a bit less satisfying for lighter backgrounds, so I had to fiddle with image darkening (I tried pasting photos in powerpoint and then adding a semi-transparent grey background). After spending much too much time on this, I’d found a fake background that worked for me (No, I’m not showing it here, sorry)
Much more important was how I would set up the powerpoint presentation. If I used normal presenter mode, I would have a full screen taken for the presentation, and the other taken for the speaker notes, leaving me no space for the zoom screen (questions, breakout rooms, etc).
What I discovered was that if I started the presentation in presenter mode (alt-shift-F5 on windows) and then moved the speaker notes window to the same screen as the presentation (windows-shift-left arrow), this put the presentation on my external monitor and the speaker notes on my primary (laptop) monitor.
When I shared my screen in Zoom, I would select ‘advanced’ and then share just the portion of the speaker’s page, now on the external monitor, that had the presentation screen. (Yellow boxed area on photo)
Playing around a bit more, I realized Powerpoint has a transcription feature which would allow me to also broadcast subtitle’s as I spoke. This was especially useful as English was a second or third language for the participants. The transcription is processed on my laptop, so subtitles are fine even if network quality is poor.
Practice Run
We did a practice run a few days ahead of the training, along with my (also-locked-down) university colleagues. This let me get honest feedback on my fake background, along with audio and video quality. Oddly, audio quality was best without my fancy mic or headphones (I later realized the problem was again the Dell USB Hub I was connecting through).
Training Day
The day started out smoothly, except that one participant missed the training entirely because he was using the web version of Zoom, which happened to be experiencing global outage at that time. The others used the app and joined with no problems.
There were technical glitches that we missed during preparation and discovered in real-time (e.g. related to creating in-session polls, managing breakout rooms, sharing audio, etc)
I did my best to ensure a good network connection from my laptop, running an ethernet cable down two flights of steps and directly into my router. But despite my best efforts, I did lose network connection several times during the training (latter solved by plugging directly into the cable modem, which ironically was lower-end but more stable).
Zoom has a nice breakout room feature (I’m sure other tools have something similar). The host can choose the number of rooms, with participants randomly assigned. Participants can ask questions from the rooms, and the host can temporarily join each room, broadcast messages to the rooms, re-shuffle participants, etc). Great feature, except it was just at the point when I had started these groups that I lost my connection and was dropped from the training I was giving. When I re-entered two minutes later, I no longer had access to the rooms my participants were in, so I’d lost contact with my participants
Wracking my brain how to retrieve my lost participants when suddenly a man in the main conference room started talking to me, explaining how he had just checked on each breakout room and had agreed with them all that they would wrap up the discussions and return to the main room in 5 minutes. Completely surprised, I assumed this was some university zoom administrator who had taken over. In fact, zoom had automatically assigned one of the training participants as the new host in my place. This person had decided to take over responsibility for supervising the group!
The result was that the breakout sessions went a bit longer than I had planned, so we skipped one of the planned breaks. Not ideal.
Lessons learned
Virtual training presented some notable advantages. For me, it was easier to reference my notes when needed (I turned my camera off while presenting slides). Participants, for their part, could join with less burden of travel, arranging child care, etc. (I know several would check on children during the breaks). It was also much easier for participants to share their screens with the group after breakout sessions, something I always struggled with during in-person trainings.
On the flip side, I missed being able to ask spontaneous questions with a simple ‘show of hands’. I also couldn’t read the faces to see if someone looked puzzled. With everyone on mute by default, there was no spontaneous laughter at my jokes (a few of which were funny). Of course there also were unscheduled distractions on participants, typically from housemates, pets, or children, and I’m fairly certain the daughter of a participant joined the training from her phone at one point (on mute, of course)
The only serious concern I had was that some participants did not always join the breakout rooms they were assigned to during group exercises. This would typically not happen during in-person trainings. In the flip side, I imagine these were the people who felt it benefited them most to work on tasks alone, and so they were able to make that choice themselves.
In Conclusion
At this point, I’ve taught two virtual trainings and am scheduled to teach two more later this month. Although we were initially unsure how they would compare to in-person trainings, I have to say that I’m quite happy with how they went. We also feel these worked well with the students, who were able to freely ask questions and steer the discussions towards areas most relevant to their work.
With the right preparation and with a conscious effort to invite questions and solicit audience participation, participants still benefit from the live, interactive training that differentiates these dynamic trainings from the static content available in books or pre-recorded online courses.
I don’t know what the future mixture of on-site vs virtual trainings will be. The private trainings I have scheduled with companies this spring will be virtual, but I expect the analytics translator trainings I have scheduled at UvA in September will be in the classroom.
If you’d like to stay informed about my training schedule as it materializes, you can subscribe for notifications at https://dsianalytics.com/training-news.