How can you maintain orientation through the seminar?

What needs to be considered in the virtual environment?

Which IT infrastructure is needed?

1. Do a lot more of preparation in advance: When starting the seminar in the morning, it is too late for preparation. Therefore, prepare all your case study spreadsheets in advance. Also give information about virtual access of the video conference tool and the course material.

2. Provide a suitable video conference infrastructure: You need a stable online Video conferencing tool. VMN - Valuemanager Ninaus is in favour of two systems therefore but this is personally opinion. ZOOM and MS Teams work out fine for this. both systems can handle 40+ participants. Both have advantages but for the seminar purpose we prefer ZOOM becuase of the breakout sessions in group working mode.

3. Use a professional data sharing platform: You need to exchange a lot of information to your participants. For sharing content and annoucements the platform Moodle despites others is appropriate. That is your backbone for file sharing, shcedule information, group formation and so on. Moodle has developed nice features like automatic group member assignment and offers various functions for material uploads for your participants.

4. Provide a detailed schedule for the seminar. Especially in a virtual traning environment,it is essential for participants during a long training day to know when to be on stage and whne to be offline for pauses. The participants want to know when they have time for breaks and to relax and get strengths for the next sessions. furthermore, tell them in advance when the have to listen to the lecturer and whne the have to switch to group work. If you want to be genious also them them which tools to use for their teamworks.

5. Formulate clear milestones with time limits: you cannot send the participants in their breakout sessions to do their groupwork without clear targets for each session. Explain the targets that have to be achieved. Then let them work on it.

The EN12973 working plan is perfect structure to show the progress during seminar:

6. Coach each group during case studies: show up in each virtual room and ask for questions and feedback for understanding the task. Control the results within the group virtual room. You want have time that all groups can present all milestones of a case study.

7. Allow sufficient time for the group session: Additional time must be provided for the virtual group sessions to be carried out.Nevertheless, be flexible for the teams if they think they can make a session quicker. Then shorten the duration. Here ZOOM has a nice function to force all group members to come back to the main virtual room at once.

8. set up clear communication rules during the seminar: tell the participants how to use the video conference tool. Tell themn when to mute their microphones and when to switch of video. But what we even prefer is to tell them when to switch on the video as well. Trust us, it really can get boring seeing no face for most of the time during seminar.