The Covid-19 pandemic forced me to go through one of the most painful and difficult transitions in my life. I do talks and teach seminars to corporate clients. When lockdowns hit, people mostly went into a full panic mode and corporate L&D was no exception. Everything I had on my calendar was either cancelled or put on hold. But after a few weeks it became apparent that life goes on. Corporate education still exists, it’s just that our choice of venues is now limited to “Zoom or Teams”.
I initially reacted to this perspective with cautious curiosity. I’m not a fan of needless travel, the logistical part of my job being the one I enjoy the least. Doing a seminar in Kazakhstan without the dubious pleasure of flying there for the seventh time is something I would actually welcome, no offence to my Kazakh friends. That is in theory. In practice, my initial attempts at doing online seminars left me in a state of the utmost hatred for this new reality. For days after the seminar, I was depressed, completely drained of energy, squeezed out like a tube of toothpaste. I didn’t enjoy my work anymore.
Normally, I love my work. This is my baseline. I am reasonably good at what I do, but I still can’t lead seminars with my eyes closed. I need to see the audience. Online, even if people have their cameras on (which they don’t) the view is just too bloody small. I can’t see their faces, their reactions, I can ask them to raise their emoji-hands, but very few do, I don’t understand whether they found the presentation useful or awful. I had to break continuous two-day seminars into smaller parts. Some of the people missed some of the parts, some lost their motivation in the middle and disappeared without a trace. It was a complete nightmare. On top of that, I attended lectures and seminars at INSEAD where I was a student at the time, and they were so bad, it was unbelievable. No, no, no. Online teaching doesn’t work. This was not what I signed up for when I was entering this profession.
I wasn’t alone in this. A friend of mine, a teacher of contact dance, decided she was just going to wait until the pandemic was over. Yes, a year. Perhaps two, it didn’t matter. Most of my peers were equally pessimistic. “Yes, it’s not the same and we’re charging less for it”. But some weren’t. Another dance-teacher-friend, who was teaching non-contact solo dancing (which unlike contact dancing works online quite well), embraced the new reality. He put together a small production and marketing team, launched an online dance school, and was much better off overall. Another friend who had formerly been a TV presenter was elated. For him this was paradise. Sit at home, do the work, get paid, no need to put your pants on – well, you know the narrative.
He was a great inspiration. Not the pants-free part, but the working-on-camera-is-easy part. He was the one who forced me to say to myself, “Well, if Skvortsov can do it, why not me?” It turns out, I can do it too. After about a year (yeah, it wasn’t quick) I was enjoying my work to the same degree as before and probably even more. At some point I was doing a seminar for some surgeon oncologists and one of them said in closing: “I was preparing myself for a painfully slow, dreadful 4 hours. But time just flew.” Another student, an information security expert, said “This was the best online seminar I ever attended”. Wow, I thought. Sounds like I have achieved something in this domain. So yes, it is a bit too late to share my insights now that the pandemic has nearly fizzled out. Still, here are my 5 cents.
1. Invest in hardware
Light, camera, sound. These three elements make (or break) the immersiveness of the whole show. If you have a new MacBook or some other high-end laptop then perhaps you can skip the microphone and camera part of this advice. I upgraded about a year ago to discover that the 3-microphone system Apple designed is quite on par with a $200 condenser microphone. The latter I bought a year prior, after realising that the built-in microphone in my 2018 MacBook was simply inadequate and that this had a huge negative impact on listener’s experiences. That microphone I bought was a great improvement.
I decided not to buy an external camera, I simply used the excellent camera of my iPhone. I bought a telescopic stand and a software piece called EpocCam Pro. New iPhones can connect to new Macs without any additional software. The camera in my current Macbook is also decent enough, so now I use the iPhone camera for really important events only.
Proper lighting is also important, but that part I acquired by moving into a new apartment with a well-designed lighting set-up. Less expensive options are also available, or so I heard.
2. Use ground rules
I always begin my online talks and seminars with a few ground rules, something I rarely did before. Ground rules are crutches, I didn’t need them before, but this is a new environment, so I need them now. This short list is a product of a long evolution. I tried many things, and most of them didn’t have any meaningful impact. These three things work.
2.1 “Please feel free to interrupt me at any moment”
The, and I mean THE problem with online teaching is real-time feedback. It’s too hard to interrupt someone online, so people just sit back and relax, which is the exact opposite of engagement. Inviting interruptions helps. Also, interruptions are what differentiates a talk delivered in real-time from a recorded one. Recorded talks have a huge advantage; you can watch them at 1.5x speed. What you miss is personalisation, it’s a canned experience. Interruptions = personalisation. When interruption happens, thank the interrupter and encourage others to interrupt. This will lead to more interruptions. I want more people to feel like this talk was delivered exclusively for them.
Specify the way you want to be interrupted. If I have fewer than 40-50 people, I tell them to say the word “Alexei” first so I can pause, or to write something (anything!) in a chat box. I am monitoring the chat box. For more than 50 people I skip the “say Alexei” part, the chat box is enough.
2.2. “Your reflections are welcome”
Reflections are not questions, they are thoughts, associations, metaphors. Before Covid I tended to discourage reflections because they seemed like a perfectly pointless waste of time. “Do you have a question? No, then let’s move on”. But that was a time when I got too much feedback. Now my problem is that I don’t have enough. So I encourage reflections.
2.3. “I appreciate it if you leave your camera on”
I ask people to turn on their cameras in the beginning, at the end and after the breaks. I tell them it’s ok to turn it off later. I also tell people it’s ok to stand up and get some tea, or have a stretch and that there is no need to turn the camera off for that. I don’t expect them to sit still for 1.5 hours. If people don’t have a camera or can’t turn it on, I ask them to put something in the chat box so we know they are there.
As the talk progresses, most people turn their cameras off. But quite a few leave them on. I talk to these people and ignore the black boxes unless they say something in a chat. Luckily, I don’t need a lot of people to talk to.
3. Ask for feedback
Whenever you feel like you don’t understand how the audience is doing, just ask. “How are you feeling? Would you please write two words in a chat box ”. A great time for this is when people either go on a break or return from a break. The downside is that you have to react. If people say they’re tired you can’t ignore this.
As you are presenting, ask questions. If you begin with approximately 10 people out of 30 answering you, and in an hour there are only 3 — people need a break.
4. Work in shorter increments
This is a relatively big investment since it requires a massive overhaul of all your content. Instead of one 1.5-hour talk, try making 5 short, TED-style increments and have a small discussion after each one. We can haggle about the exact duration, the increments can be 30 minutes or even 50 minutes – anything’s better than 90. Yes, the TikTok generation, the attention span of a goldfish. Sadly, this is how online works. On the bright side, it does work!
5. Talk to the imaginary audience
This requires a lot of practice and it’s best to practise this with the content you already know well. As you speak, try IMAGINING yourself talking to a live audience and them reacting. You need to try doing this during rehearsals first – you still need to rehearse, did I mention that? Imagine saying a phrase to somebody and them reacting with agreement, indignation or maybe even contempt, depending on where you’re leading them next. Then say the next phrase and the next phrase. Keep imagining. Bloody difficult work, let me tell you. Changes your way of speaking dramatically, and for the better, too.
My problem with teaching online was that my emotional expenditures just weren’t paying out. I was investing a lot of energy in preparing, rehearsing and delivering. And in return I got, what, a measly “Thank you” in a chat box? No surprise I was exhausted. So I still try as much as I can to conjure emotional feedback from the audience. But if that’s not enough, I just manufacture an extra bit by myself. Good news, it can be done. And of course, if there’s a mismatch between my imagination and what people say out loud, chances are people have a point.
To conclude, online talks and seminars can be done really well. It will be a lot of work, especially if you’re just beginning. It can be discomforting, especially if you are transferring from the offline world, where you already were a successful speaker, to the world where you are a beginner again and have to compete for your spot under the Sun with people 20 years younger. Good news, it’s not all in vain. The most important part, after all, is not the form, but your content and your “why”, your values, virtues and principles, your deep motivation. These are hard to acquire. Compared to this, learning to present online is trivial. You can definitely do it.
Hi Alexei, good stuff!
How do you deal with streaming quality?
For example, I am not sure, if Zoom streams in good fullHD quality, I think it is max HD with pretty low bitrate :( I mean, still video quality is not crystal clear. Are there some advanced settings for Zoom Pro accounts, for example?
Also small remark: I think, it is not '4-microphone system Apple designed', but it is actually 3-mic array system on latest Pros and Airs.