Following a post over at OUP Global: Teaching from a distance via videoconferencing, I’d like to add some more ideas taken from  a conference call class with a client I just had.

Keep it short. I’ve heard some clients say that their conference calls go on and on and on. Hours. That’s far too long to pay attention, and far far too long if English is not your first language. Conference call classes should be short. The one I just finished lasted 30 minutes. It was filled with energy, and my student had no trouble following our activities. Respect your audience’s attention span, and keep your classes short.

Keep it focused. Planning is key here. Make sure you have your activities well planned out in advance. (And be prepared to email content to participants as a backup plan – tech glitches always happen.) Know exactly what you want to do, and explain it to your participants BEFORE your session begins. (Show were you intend to go.) Avoid deviations.

Keep activities short, and varied. Again, to gain and maintain attention of your participants, I think it’s a good idea to keep your activity roster full and varied. Today I was working with an actuarial manager. We worked through a 4 paragraph section of a large article about teleunderwriting. Our main focus was on taking graphical information, and reporting it back as if he was doing a presentation. I modeled the style of language we were looking to work with: “According to the graph, the number of truthful answers gathered on the survey was x%.” (This part alone took us a while to get down correctly.)

After student was comfortable with the target language, I turned him loose on the real graph info from the article. I made sure my instructions were simple and specific: look at the graph, and tell me about the % of respondents who answered truthfully. (Article dealing with effectiveness of teleunderwriting vs. traditional Face to Face interviews.)  It took us a few attempts, but after a minute or two, my student was flowing smoothly through the different percentages on the graph. (It’s so interesting to see how in the practice part of the class, the student picked up the target language pretty easily. When faced with “the real thing” there seemed to be a bit of hesitation. Reality intimidates, so building as much realia into the class is added value for student!

10 minutes later, we were ready for a switch. My student writes English emails on a regular basis, so that was our next direction. The online presentation system I work with has a built in chat section on the page. Again, I started with a simple explanation of what we would be doing: I explained out loud that we’re going to work on writing. I will send you a short info request via the chat section. (I wrote something like: Juan, please let me know about the percentage of truthful vs untruthful responses from the teleunderwriting survey.)

I set up the situation orally:  imagine you’re writing an email to your head office to report this information. And he was off. After a minute or two, I had my response. There were a few mistakes, but he got his message across pretty clearly.

Dealing with errors. The text I got back had two minor mistakes. I opened a fresh whiteboard page on my meeting site, and gave my student access and the ability to edit the document. I then pasted his first response into the page, and let him know there were two minor mistakes, emphasizing them as I repeated his answer back to him. As he spotted his mistakes, I invited him to do a real time rewrite of his work.

Class ended as soon as he finished.

30 minutes flew by quickly, but they were on target, focused, and 100% helpful for the student.

Always be Checking in: final, and perhaps vital thought: When leading a teleconference class, always let your students know what you’re about to do. “Ok, now I’m going to scroll down to page 3, paragraph 2.” or “We’re going to switch over to x page now.”  - And always check in before you begin: (you finish scrolling, page switching etc,) then say something like: So does everyone see X on your screen? Await confirmation from everyone before you proceed. Sometimes connection lag can slow things down for your participants. What you see on your screen, may not yet be the same for them. Always be checking in.

What do you do to make your teleconference classes effective?