I love watching our local Points West, TV News for the South West of England. A little twee, yes, but for 20 or so minutes, it keeps me engaged, entertained and informed.
Whatever is your favourite news programme, be it on YouTube, Netflix or TV, good shows have a habit of keeping you glued for 20 minutes or so.
The show is well prepared, practised and polished. You have a variety of snippets, various camera angles, presenters talking to you, in-studio discussions, outside broadcasts and respectable visuals to back up the news.
In general, they succeed to keep you connected and occupied.
Most voice-over PowerPoint slide online training sessions do not. And that’s a great shame because many folks regard these as the best they can achieve with online live learning. When invited to online learning events, complain of Zoom Fatigue, system failure or some other kind of excuse to beg the trainer to perform once again in a classroom.
Zoom fatigue is caused by:
- The poor production quality of the online session
- Terrible audio so tricky to hear
- Bad lighting
- Continuous PowerPoint slides
- Voice-over PowerPoint, without a trainer’s face to be seen
- Poor framing of any trainer
- Hazy camera shots from a cheap webcam
It’s “Death by VoiceOver PowerPoint.”
High-quality production is expected on TV, and you don’t even notice it as you’re informed and entertained. You enjoy the show and come back for more.
Similarly, we should target our live online training to be the same, to emulate the TV News. We need to strive for better production, superior design of the session and professional delivery. To step out from behind the slides and make the trainer the show’s centre, the nerve centre of the experience.
A live online training workshop should be a live-streamed TV show with you as the facilitator, just like Alex and David from Points West.
