Online Presentations from a Teacher’s Perspective

Until recently, I was an educator in the public school system with close to twenty years of teaching experience. However, for many reasons, I decided to make a change. I started working in human resources as an organizational development consultant. Sometimes I feel completely out of my depth, and struggle with imposter syndrome. Partially because of that, I’m taking as much professional development as I can. I’m reading everything I can get my hands on, listening to podcasts, taking part in webinars, connecting with other HR professionals, and taking courses. I’ve noticed, particularly when it comes to online courses and presentations, they aren’t always based in best practices when it comes to teaching. Even though I was teaching young students, much of my experience is relevant to adults as well.

Adult Attention Spans:

The biggest pet peeve that I see in professional development is the length of time we’re expected to pay attention, just listening to someone talk, without any kind of break. Best practice for school-age children is to match their attention span to their age in minutes. So, when teaching ten-year-old students, teach for a maximum of ten minutes before changing activities.

I did some digging into what was considered best practices in terms of attention span for teaching adults, but I couldn’t find a conclusive answer. Most of the research I found seemed to be about the length of classes or courses. From my experience teaching students and in my experience as a learner, I think the key is not necessarily the length of the course, but the length of time spent listening to a lecture. I’ve taken three-hour courses where there was some time spent listening to someone lecture, a break to discuss, an activity, back to listening, and I was engaged, even though the course lasted three hours. On the flip side, I’ve sat through lectures where I had a very hard time keeping my attention on what presenters were saying even for fifteen minutes.

Break up lectures:

Lecturing and keeping people’s attention for a long time is very challenging. There are so many articles and courses about how to effectively do this and it’s difficult! You need to be speaking about a topic that is directly relevant, using interesting story-telling techniques, visually interesting graphics, tone of voice that is just musical enough to be engaging but not so much that it sounds fake or patronizing… it’s hard! I honestly think that people who are excellent speakers are rare.

In my opinion, this means unless you are one of those rare people who can captivate a room with only your voice and some visuals for a long period of time, mix it up. Ask engaging questions and allow people to respond in different ways. Have people do a simple activity that gets them thinking and doing things, throw in a pop quiz, use a video that illustrates your point, get people laughing. This is also hard and takes a lot of preparation. Some people will hate it. They want to just turn their brains off and have you do the thinking for them. But I also know from experience that this does not to lead to lasting learning.

A few tips for making sure there will be some lasting learning from your online presentation:

1. Outline what you’re going to be talking about. If possible, send this out in advance so that folks have a better idea of what they’re going to be learning about and can prime their brains to think about what they already know about the topic and come up with questions they might want to ask.
2. Encourage participation early. Ask an easy to answer question early on and encourage people to answer however they feel comfortable, out loud or in a chat if possible. Let them know that the expectation is that there will be discussion and questions.
3. Switch it up. Have different people speak, show a video clip, have a longer discussion period in the middle, if it’s a really long presentation, encourage folks to stand up a stretch for minute or even just look away from their screens for a moment.
4. Monitor the chat. If you aren’t able to monitor it while you’re presenting (presuming there is a chat feature), ask someone else to monitor it for you. It can be discouraging to participation if questions aren’t being responded to in some way.
5. Summarize your points. The more often people hear what you have to say, the more likely they are to remember it.

In summary:

Even though adult learning is different than teaching children, there are similarities. It is unrealistic to expect adults to keep their attention on someone who is lecturing for long periods of time. Lectures should be broken up with discussions or other activities in order to keep their attention.