When in-person workshops and physical classrooms are no longer an option, many of us turn to a virtual setting to continue our practice. This is a challenge, especially when you use collaboration and interactive exercises to draw on the wisdom of the group. How can you convert such an in-person workshop into an equally engaging online experience?
Here are 9 best practices I’ve gathered from over a decade of converting physical, in-person workshops to a virtual environment.
1. Design a unique experience
The first thing we need to recognize is that we won’t be able to fully replicate the experience of an in-person workshop. Getting together IRL just feels different than gathering from our laptops at home.
Therefore, to convert an in-person workshops to virtual, we need to re-think the experience.
Consider the critical elements of your workshop and think about how to design them for a virtual space. If you can’t shake a person’s hands any longer, how can you recreate that experience online?
Networking can turn into virtual coffee chats on Slack, work sheets are replaced by online whiteboards, and table groups become Zoom break-out rooms.
Don’t stop there. Just like IRL has many great advantages, a virtual environment also offers unique advantages that we can lean into. Online is particularly good for asynchronous individual study & work, for building long-term online communities, for personalized learning, or for digitizing results. In a virtual workshop, it’s much easier to dial in experts or thought leaders than bringing them on stage IRL. Or how about creating a Slack community designed to promote psychological safety among the participants before the workshop even starts.
Instead of trying to replicate IRL, let’s make our virtual workshops a unique experience.
2. Reinvent the structure
A different experience will require us to reconsider our workshop structure. I recommend a blended learning approach that brings out the best of each modality. Blended learning is traditionally a mix of asynchronous individual time with synchronous virtual meetings. Think of it like a program: Asynchronous preparation and information sharing ahead of time, in order to make the most of the synchronous time together, with continued reflection and sharing afterwards.
Based on this, I use the following rule of thumb to restructure a workshop: 1-day in-person workshop =
Get ready: 30–60 min synchronous kick-off + 60 min asynchronous pre-work
Collaborate & synthesize: 2 x 90 min synchronous workshop sessions x 2 days
Build community: asynchronous post-work
Here’s an example of a virtual workshop break-down. Start the pre-work phase 1–2 weeks before the actual workshop sessions.
One minute of classroom time does not equal one minute of virtual time. With the setup described above, I will be able to cover between 60–80% of what I usually cover in a 1-day in-person workshop. It means, I also need to re-consider my learning objectives and re-arrange my learning activities to adapt to virtual.
You will also need to reinvent your materials & tools. Virtual whiteboards replace physical sticky notes, markers and worksheets. Video conferencing replaces the workshop venue. Laptops replace the projector and screen. Homemade coffee and snacks replace catering. How might you orchestrate all this to create a unique, virtual experience?
3. Smaller group sizes for more engaging experiences
The majority of people want learning experiences that are social, collaborative, and personalized. In order to provide such an experience in a virtual workshop, we need to tailor the size of our group to the experience we want to provide.
In small groups of up to 10 participants, everyone will get a chance to speak up. People can build social connections and you can adapt many face-to-face activities for a virtual environment. With up to 10 people, you will remember people’s names and you can keep your technical implementation fairly straight forward: A single-room video conferencing tool and a virtual whiteboard tool should do.
If there is a requirement to have a larger group, I’ve found the sweet spot to be at around 25 participants. Work with break-out rooms using Zoom or Microsoft Teams, as well as a virtual whiteboard, to keep engagement and collaboration high. With 25 participants, you can create 5 teams with 5 participants each. Keep the teams the same throughout the first day, and then switch it up the next day. This is great for ideation or co-creation workshops.
Once you have more than 30 participants, the connection with the facilitator and between participants will be more distant. With each participant you add, you introduce more variables that will become harder to control. Will they be able to access the technology? Is their internet bandwidth strong? Are people in the right breakout room? For these large-group workshops — I’m thinking of conferences or public workshops — you can control a lot of that risk with good on-boarding or pre-work. Get people onto a shared communication platform, such as Slack, for networking and trouble-shooting.
4. Kick-off with impact
The biggest obstacle to success I’ve observed in virtual workshops is technical troubleshooting.
A 30–60 minute virtual kickoff meeting a few days before your actual workshop allows you to test and practice the technology with the group. Introduce participants to your virtual whiteboard, video conferencing tool, communication platform, and so on.
A kick-off call is also a wonderful opportunity to get to know your participants (and vice versa). Lastly, an interactive kickoff sets the expectation that active participation for the entirety of the virtual program will be required.
For example, to introduce whiteboard features, and for participants to get to know each other, I’ve started doing a kind of obstacle course of stickies that users complete during a virtual kick-off meeting.
This virtual whiteboard sticky obstacle course introduces the most relevant commands and encourages participants to get to know each other.
I also like to ask participants “What do you hope to get out of this workshop” and invite them to use annotation features or the chat function to share their goals.
If a synchronous kickoff call is not possible, you can also achieve these outcomes with good on-boarding during pre-work.
5. Maximize learning outcomes through pre-work
The next task is to identify what can be taught synchronously vs. asynchronously. Start with an inventory of your learning objectives from your in-person workshop. Decide which learning objectives might translate to pre-work activities. Typically, they are learning objectives that don’t require the guidance of a facilitator. I also like to include something that activates prior knowledge.
For those familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy, I generally use learning objectives lower on the pyramid for pre-work, and learning objectives higher on the pyramid for activities during the workshop, as well as post-work. The higher up, the more cognitive guidance is required.
Watching videos, reading articles, reflections, brainstorming and self-assessments make for great pre-work activities. I like to use the principle of one activity, two outcomes: participants complete a learning activity, using a tool or application that they will also use during the workshop.
Let’s say I need to convert a Design Thinking workshop to a virtual program. These are a couple of learning objectives that I could move to pre-work. If I use a virtual whiteboard during the workshop, I make sure that one of the pre-work activities includes that as well.
Pre-work helps ensure that all participants have approximately the same level of knowledge coming into the virtual workshop. Include a small mission that serves as a check-point if they completed the pre-work. Did they upload the “Day in a Life” map? Did you receive the self-assessment?
Asynchronous pre-work often happens on top of participants’ regular workload. I therefore recommend no more than 60 minutes of pre-work. I also recommend it to be completed individually. To self-organize a group of peers can add to the workload as well.
6. Make the synchronous time together count
We have now arrived at designing the actual virtual workshop, distributed over two days. In my experience, the maximum a person can do for a single synchronous session is 90 minutes. Add a good break of 30 minutes in between two sessions of 90 minutes. Then call it a day and continue the following day. Three hours of meeting virtually is almost as exhausting as a full-day meeting IRL.
With only 90 minutes of quality time with my participants, I really want to make that count. This is not the time to teach or lecture (which can be outsourced to pre-work), but the time to collaborate, synthesize ideas and give feedback.
For a virtual Design Thinking program, here are a few learning objectives that I could to cover during the virtual workshop. During this precious time together I want to focus on learning objectives that benefit from collaboration and facilitator guidance.
As a rule of thumb, participants should be engaged at least every 5–10 minutes. The easy way to do this is through polls & questions. But to really make us of this precious time together, my favorite way to engage participants is through small-team activities on a shared virtual whiteboard, working on contextually relevant topics. Contextually relevant means that the topic is relevant to the participants’ everyday work.
Just like you prepare handouts and worksheets for in-person workshops, you can do the same for virtual workshops. Because you have a total of 4 x 90 min sessions, setup four workspaces for each team in your virtual whiteboard of choice.
Here’s an example of a workspace I created for an ideation workshop a few weeks ago. The setup (which is mirrored in the presentation slides) helps participants find their next task as soon as they enter a break-out room.
Lastly, when you adapt your slides for your virtual workshop, don’t forget that you will lose roughly 30% of your real estate due to the video conferencing tool you use. Make sure to account for that as well.
7. Have a producer
With a good portion of your lecture-based content pushed to pre-work, your role during the virtual workshop is that of a facilitator — and not of a presenter. So that you can fully focus on engaging up to 25 participants, I recommend you also have a producer — someone who helps with delivery, ensuring everything runs seamlessly. The producer helps participants with tech issues, setting up breakout rooms, or opening and closing polls. Let the producer worry about the technical details, so that the facilitator can fully focus on content and engagement.
The larger your workshop, the more hands you need on deck. With more than 25 participants, you will also need co-facilitators, and people monitoring a help desk. Create a detailed run sheet so that the producer can run the show effortlessly. Use different colors to indicate the type of activity. Specify when it’s time to move people into break-out rooms. In a physical workshop you usually have a list of materials — in a virtual workshop it’s a list of URLs to the workspaces you prepared.
8. Build community through post-work
As mentioned earlier, one of the things the virtual space is particularly good at, is building long-term communities. They encourage participants using the shared language they built in the workshop, cross-fertilizing ideas, getting feedback from others, and practicing what they’ve learned in the context of their work.
At the end of your virtual workshop, save 10 minutes to introduce the post-work. If you run workshops distributed over several weeks, then post-work becomes pre-work for the next engagement. Prepare a few activities or small nudges that you can drop in your community on a regular basis to keep engagement high.
What might this look like?
Continue using the same communication platform you used throughout the pre-work (e.g. Slack).
Invite participants to share best practices (articles, books, etc.).
Share insights gleaned from user research.
Document vigorously with a sound knowledge management structure.
Interact often and asynchronously with other peers.
Reserve time for a live Q&A with the facilitator.
Receive feedback from participants (surveys).
Give space for personal reflection, ensuring that what is learned is recalled in the future.
Keep in mind though, community management can be quite resource-intense. Set clear expectations about how hands-on or hands-off you will manage the community. One way to keep your involvement low is to nominate participants on a rotating basis, or to have a manager or ambassador inside a company to continuously coach members.
9. Package the virtual experience like a program
Your workshop is no longer a workshop. As you convert a workshop into a virtual experience, it’s starting to resemble more like a program with asynchronous and synchronous learning events. It’s more of a journey than a single event.
As part of the program, I like to include a small “marketing” campaign to encourage participants to complete their pre-work, and keep engagement high during post-work. Use videos, email campaigns, or a competition. Focus on communicating the benefits and build excitement about the workshop, and the community and results that come out of it.
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