As part of the expanding responsibilities of my job, I have now performed live training both in person and over the Web. The two are similar and different at the same time. Training over the Web carries with it a special set of quirks, many of those quirks in the area of human interaction.

For example, I know I’m talking to real people real time, but when they are silently listening to me present information, I am disconnected from them due to the lack of physical proximity. I know I’m not talking to myself, but at times it felt like I was.

In one of the trial runs mentioned in the previous post (The Technical Writer–Trainer Hybrid), all of the attendees had to go to another meeting except a member of the support team. However, they didn’t disconnect from the Web meeting, so their names continued to be listed as participants. Therefore, later on when I saw a little bug in the system, I addressed the quality assurance lead, and he didn’t answer. It didn’t occur to me until later that he had left for the meeting. Because he was never physically there, I lost the sense of whether he was “in the meeting.”

As have we moved into “beta” tests of the training sessions with beta users of our application, I have become more comfortable with it. In yesterday’s session, I found myself gesturing with my hands, even though only one person was in the room with me, and she was behind me. No one could see my gesticulating, but I felt more engaged in the training because I was thus more animated. In today’s session, I continued to gesture, which also feels like a natural thing to do while communicating. (Bonus: I think gesturing helped me avoid sending my mouse pointer wiggling all over the screen because my hand was not on the mouse at those times. A hyper mouse pointer is rather distracting.)

When you are training remotely and are not involving video conferencing, there is no feedback from the audience. You can’t see how attentive people are, and it may be a greater temptation for them to get up for a drink of water. He can’t see me, so he doesn’t know I’m not here. I hope that I am not less of a person to the audience because they can’t see me.

Web training feels about twice as long as it really is, and it can be more tiring even than live training. Perhaps the former phenomenon results from the fact that interaction is not instantaneous, even with a phone conference. Sound travels quickly around the earth, but it still must travel. Having to manipulate the presentation software also adds time. It may be that added work, as well as the attempt to connect on some personal level with the participants, that causes the increased mental exertion and exhaustion.

In any case, many of the participants may hardly suspect that the trainer is also learning and has had to train himself. But our beta users are already accustomed to being picked on, so I expect that sitting through a new Web trainer’s curriculum was not too far out of order.

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