Hey Katie,
When you have no other choice, there’s nothing to complain about. 😉 So virtual classes are generally ok, but…
It depends on individual students, but as a rule of thumb it’s more difficult to get any feedback throughout a training.
There’s no room for body language communication, no way to see if people are engaged and understand just by looking at the way they stare at the slides. Moreover, there’s often no way to make sure if they are even listening or are they afk perhaps. No small talk and networking during coffee breaks, lunch time and on evenings.
Regardless whether students have questions or not, I try to ‘ping’ them asking for questions after each slide module, I try to ask them if they are good with labs from time to time and are there any challenging parts, but sometimes all communications with a student ends with ‘hi’ on the chat on the very first day of a class (maybe followed by personal introduction when we have a slide for this). Sometimes that makes me feel like I’m gonna talk to myself for the next couple of days, so I just started telling them I’d really appreciate any sign of life over Zoom. 😉
I also started using my camera recently, without forcing them to do the same. I think now it just feels more natural when they can see me speaking and I can also use gestures to emphasize and depict things I’m saying.
I think students are rather engaged but they are more prone to distractions such as work e-mails, calls, home issues, some decide to call a day earlier and finish labs on evenings…
Sometimes due to lack of instant feedback and body language I find it difficult to adjust some topics on the fly. I know some people are new to Extreme and just 1 year in the industry but might be familiar with OSPF from cover to cover and some people are 10+ years in network administration but they appreciate routing principles resume. I’m not sure if it’d be good idea to ask students should I speed up/slow down/emphasize/skip slides every quarter especially while lacking responses. All this can result in a situation where some more advanced students may just feel bored with some topics, but if we have mixed audience that’s expected somehow.
Cheers,
Tomasz
