Perfecting Timing – Episode 31

In this episode, host Beth Cougler Blom talks about timing considerations when planning and facilitating workshops.

Beth explores:

  • Cultural considerations related to time
  • Using a lesson plan template to help with timing
  • How learning outcomes help us make decisions about timing
  • Timekeeping while facilitating
  • Tracking and reflecting on timing-related issues
  • Additional considerations for the virtual and e-learning modes of learning

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Show Transcript

[Upbeat music playing]

[Show intro]
Beth
Welcome, to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator wherever you work. I’m your host, Beth Cougler Blom.

Beth Cougler Blom
Hi there. Thank you so much for choosing to listen to this episode today. This is Episode 31, and this is going to be all about perfecting timing in the learning experiences that we are planning and facilitating.

Throughout this episode I’m going to be sharing with you a lot of the things that I think about while I’m planning to facilitate something in that design stage, and then what happens during the session around timing that we think about and have to do, and then some of the things that I think about and do after facilitating a learning experience as well.

I’m going to be talking mostly about in-person facilitation, and then I’ll go quickly into a couple of things that might change when you’re facilitating virtual experiences and some things that might stay the same. And I’ll mention a couple of ideas around e-learning, asynchronous online learning, as well. But mostly what we’ll be going over to today is relevant to the in-person and virtual modes.

Now as we get started, before I really jump into the main content of the episode, I want to take a moment to tell you a little bit about who I am because of course it does influence my perspective on timing.

I grew up in – and I still live in – Canada. I’m a sixth generation Canadian. I have a Western European heritage. I’m a white woman. I very much recognize that the way I think about timing and how it has influenced my facilitation practice over the years has absolutely been shaped by my background and the culture that I was raised in and continue to live in. And that might be different from other cultural contexts, I’m sure. I’m not going to include in this episode the things that I know about and have seen and have realized about cultural differences related to timing. But you might be from another culture than I am from, and some of the things that I say might not work for you, and that’s just fine.

So if you’re from another culture or background, or you work in a lot of international contexts with different people from different cultures – unlike me, I tend to stay mostly in Canada for the work that I do in learning design and facilitation – you might think differently than I do about some of these topics, and that’s absolutely fine, and actually to be expected when there’s a worldwide full of people of us doing facilitation in one way, shape, or another.

Timing is a really nuanced topic. What works well in one context might need adjustments in another. And we even might need to make adjustments between organizations, between fields or sectors. So what we think about timing can change a lot depending on who we are and who we’re working with. And that’s just to be expected. If you do want to reach out and tell me something about timing – or anything that we talk about on the podcast, actually – feel free to reach out on any of my social media channels, on my website. I’d love to hear from you at any point if you have feedback about any episode. But today, of course, you are absolutely welcome to share things that work for you around timing. And feel free to disagree with me as well. I’m very open to that and to learning from you. That’s why we’re all in this work together.

OK, so let’s get on with today’s episode talking about perfecting timing.

As I get started here with sharing some of my ideas for you, I will mention that I did talk about timing quite a bit in my book, Design to Engage. If you don’t have Design to Engage, you might want to pick that up because I do share some things in the book that I don’t share in this podcast. And actually I will share some things in the podcast that I don’t have in the book. So between the two resources hopefully you’ll get a bit of a rounded look at timing and absolutely go, of course, and learn from others as well.

Let’s talk about before the session that we’re going to facilitate. What do we do related to timing and what are some of the things that help us with timing in the planning stage, in that design stage as we’re working alone, or with a co-designer or co-facilitator to think about how to put our sessions together?

Well, for me, one of the big things that has worked over many, many years, and I always recommend and help create with and for my clients, is to use a lesson planning template. I have one on my website. I talked about it in the book, so it’s on the book page. You can download a free lesson planning template there.

You can also just go into one of your favourite word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word or Pages, and start a new fresh document and then put a table in it that has five columns in it. The first column is going to say ‘time’. The second column is going to say ‘duration’. Then it’s going to be ‘facilitator activities’ in the next column. The fourth column is ‘participant activities’. And the last column is ‘resources’.

The first two columns there, time and duration, those are key for our thinking about timing, because of course the first column ‘time’, that’s where I put the time that it should be at the start of the segment that I’m going to be facilitating in the actual workshop. And then the next column, ‘duration’, of course, is how long that section is supposed to be. And I like to say things like 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes – and once I hit the hour, instead of saying 60 minutes, I’ll say one hour or one hour and 15 minutes. But honestly I almost never get to that large of a number because I chunk out my lesson plan a lot more. Usually I just see an hour for maybe the lunch [laughs], the lunchtime that I put on the lesson plan.

So use a lesson planning template and do that for everything that you facilitate, even if it’s a 30 minute thing you’re going to do for a networking group or a one hour workshop. I make a lesson plan every time. This is something that you can do in place of going straight to your PowerPoint deck and building something there. If you have my book, you know, I go into a lot of reasons why we should work in a lesson plan and not in a PowerPoint when we’re designing learning. So I won’t really go into that now at all but you can check that out and see my reasons why.

When you know – because you’re using a lesson plan – how much time everything is going to take, that helps you facilitate it in the moment. I guess the big question you might have right now is: “How do we know how long things are going to take?” [laughs] Well for me when I start lesson planning, I build that table just as I asked you to do, and then I put in the ‘givens’ – the things that I know are going to happen.

Let’s say that I’m planning a one-day workshop. I know we’re going to have a lunch, and maybe that’s going to be 60 minutes or 45 minutes or however long the client wants to take for lunch. We’re probably going to have at least one break in the morning and one break in the afternoon. Here in Canada we often see those as 15 minutes. But again, that’s an intentional thing that we choose with the clients. Sometimes people want longer for their breaks because they want to encourage more networking or what have you. So put in your breaks and your lunch first. And I like to colour those in grey as opposed to the white background just so I can see them really clearly and I can aim for them when I’m facilitating. I know when those grey rows are coming up that those are breaks and lunches.

Now what else can we put in that’s a given in terms of timing? We definitely always have opening activities and we have closing activities. Opening activities, what are we doing there? We’re welcoming the group. Here in Canada we absolutely do a land acknowledgement. We have housekeeping things that sometimes we have to talk about. Maybe we’re going to quickly go over the agenda of the workshop. Sometimes we have a separate section right after where we’re facilitating group agreements and talking about how we want to work together that day. Then maybe we’ll have some check-ins or introductions activities that we want to do right after that. There are things that we tend to do fairly frequently over and over again with different groups that you just know are going to have to happen in the beginning. So leave some time for that, whether it’s 10 minutes or 15 minutes, whatever it happens to be for your group. And of course thinking through the things that you’re putting in there and how long they’re going to take.

On the closing end you might have things like check-outs or you’re going to be talking about next steps that might happen after that workshop or after the meeting. And you certainly want to leave your participants time to fill out feedback forms. You don’t want them to be really mentally one foot out the door and thinking about going on to the next part of their day and just rushing through that feedback form. So you really have to allow time for that at the end of your lesson plan, at the end of your day.

You also might want to think if you need buffers anywhere. I sometimes call it ‘wild card time’, where I’ll put in maybe a little buffer of 10 minutes here or 10 minutes there. That just helps me have a little bit of cushion if things take longer than I think. Sometimes I put in a buffer, for example, right after lunch when people are coming back and they’re kind of – you know, some people are a little bit late coming back from lunch or we’re just informally having a little bit of a chat with the people who are in the room and maybe some questions are coming up about the morning’s activities. So sometimes I like to build in little buffers here and there just in case things take a little bit longer than what I think, and then I have not built the lesson plan so tightly that I’m in trouble. OK? So think about if there are sort of buffers that you might want to put in as you’re building out your plan. And you can look at that later as well but sometimes I put them in right at the very beginning.

Use your lesson plan to really help you build out the structure and the flow of your session. And you’re going to make one row for each segment of the session. Every time you change the topical focus, or you put in an activity, or you go on to something else, you’re going to put that in a different row. If you have a two- or three-day workshop, your lesson plan is going to be quite long. You’re going to have a lot of rows over the course of one day or two days or three days or more, and your lesson plan document will become many, many pages. And that’s just fine! But it helps us facilitate the session in the moment and we use that lesson plan all throughout the facilitation of the session.

So one big challenge that’s related to this in this design stage of using a lesson plan that I hear people talk about a lot, is they say, ‘I don’t have time for all the things I want to tell the group’. We’re talking about a workshop situation here or a course. I’m using these words very intentionally that often people do say something like that, that ‘I don’t have time for all the things I want to tell the group’.

There are a couple of things that I want to pull apart in that statement. First of all, one of the shifts that people have to make when they’re designing workshops and they’re maybe new to doing that, is the shift from thinking around ‘all the things I want to tell the group about what I know’ to incorporating activities into the workshop where the group is doing something to help them learn the thing. If you want to know more about how to do that, I have a whole other episode, Episode 19 called Choosing Activities goes into a lot of the considerations around why we would have participatory active learning, and how to choose things to do that, and so on. But this shift in our thinking about us needing to tell everybody everything, and instead incorporating activities in our lesson plan, is a crucial thing to think about as we think about timing. Because, you might know, and have experienced, that as soon as you start involving the group more – happily – in the workshop, you are going to say – and I have people say this to me all the time: ‘ah, it takes longer to do that’. When you open up the floor and give people invitations to talk and groups to work together, or pairs to talk to each other about something and share their knowledge and share their questions and that kind of thing, it takes longer than you just lecturing at the group.

But guess what? It takes longer, but it’s better. It is more effective. We know that when we involve people in their own learning, that’s what actually helps them learn and be able to integrate the knowledge and behavioural things that you really – like why you’re there in the first place, why you’re even at the workshop or at the course. So as you start your design work, I want you to come into it thinking: ‘this is going to be participatory and I need to leave a lot of space in this lesson plan for the group to work with each other’. We’ll talk about individual thinking time later, because that’s pretty crucial as well.

The other thing I really want you to remember as you start to lesson plan is that outcomes-driven design will help you make decisions around what’s in and out, in terms of content and in terms of activities. If you write measurable, observable learning outcomes – and sometimes of course you’re doing this with your client because you’re trying to figure out what’s going on and what they need and purpose and goals and all that kind of stuff – so at some point, someone, guided by you probably, or you yourself, are going to write learning outcomes for your session. The learning outcomes are the biggest key we have to timing because they hold your feet to the fire for what goes in and out. If you have things in your lesson plan that you want to put in, you’re always looking back at your learning outcomes asking yourself: ‘Well is that related to the learning outcome? Is this related to the other learning outcome? Is this activity related?’ So you’re going to be always asking yourself – and checking – we call it alignment between the learning outcomes, the content and activities, and assessments, if you’re grading anybody for your session.

So that helps you with timing decisions because if you want to put something in your session and it’s not related to a learning outcome, well maybe it doesn’t have to be there and you can actually cut that out of the plan – which helps you leave room for more meaningful things that are related to the outcomes. OK? So use outcomes as your guiding force for timing-related decisions and your scope of what’s in and out as you design your full lesson plan.

Another thing that the lesson plan document helps you do is to think about scaffolding and sequencing content and activities over time. Again, I talked about that in Episode 19: Choosing Activities. It basically is how you think about the flow of what you’re doing in the session in terms of – of course – the learner’s needs and how you can introduce and keep going with topics and activities in a logical and meaningful way, over time, through the techniques of scaffolding and sequencing.

Of course one of the big things you’re going to have to think about in the flow and structure of your workshop is how long those activities really are going to take. One of the big pieces of advice I can give you around this is to really just sit and think through every step of the way, for each activity that you want to put into your plan, and just visualize yourself or your group going through the activity. There are pieces that you have to do as a facilitator. Of course there are pieces that the participants have to do. And what are the steps that you’re leading them through and how long do these pieces take?

For example, let’s say I’m leading the 1-2-4 All activity that we have from the Liberating Structures set. This is one minute of silence for participants to think alone, two minutes in a pair, four minutes in a foursome, and then we have the rest of the time coming back to the ‘All’. And I think the write-up says that it’s a 20 minute activity. Well within that you have to introduce the activity and then you have to allow for those little bits of time for people to realize what’s happening. Maybe somebody has to ask a clarifying question about what they should be doing. Then you give them the individual thinking time. Then they have to choose a pair and that might even mean them standing up and walking to another part of the room or maybe they just turn to the person sitting next to them. So it might take a little bit of time to choose the pair. It also might take time to have the pairs stop talking to each other [laughs]. Hopefully not too much time. That’s always a challenge, especially if they’re very engaged. Then you need time to have pairs find each other so they become foursomes. And then of course we let them go and they have their conversation and we have to stop those conversations. And again, we know it’s a good sign when people are hard to stop because they’re really engaged in what’s happening. But we stop them, and then we come back to the whole group, and then we have some group debrief and discussion time.

So you would think through – as you’re looking at the write-up of that activity – all those little pieces along the way and how much [time] things take. Now Liberating Structures is fantastic because they actually give us the timing for all of the pieces usually of an activity, all of the steps, and they include the introduction time and all that kind of stuff. But other activities might not be so clear in terms of the timing that it takes. You have to use your visualization techniques and of course your past experience or asking other more experienced facilitators how they do that, and think through every step of the way to be able to get that timing as close as you can get it for what you think is going to be.

So those are some advice pieces around planning your lesson plan and the things that you have to think through in order to prepare yourself to facilitate the workshop.

Let’s go on to a few key things now about what you should do during the session around timing.

First of all, again, this is probably a cultural thing, but I think we should start and end our sessions on time. I’ve already told you I’m from a North American context. It is common to be very time-focused in my culture, so we do see it here in Canada as a sign of respect to start a session and end a session on time. You might feel differently in your context or know that certain other things work for you. That’s just fine. But know if you’re going to come to our part of the world [chuckles] that’s part of the expectation here. Maybe there’s a few minutes grace period, you know, maybe three to five minutes after the top of the hour when the session starts – to be able to start a day – is somewhat allowed, but we respect the people who are there on time by starting as close to on time as we can. And of course ending is the same if people have childcare plans or other things that they have to get to after your session, we think it’s a sign of respect to end the session at the time that we told them that it was going to end.

Now let’s go back to the whole question of ‘in the moment’ sometimes things take longer than you think. We’ve tried to mitigate some of that in our planning stage, really thinking through the steps of an activity and how long we think it’s going to take. But of course groups are individual people and things happen, and sometimes there’s a necessary thing that crops up that the group needs to discuss. Or you’re a little bit surprised as to how long something took. Or maybe you weren’t as clear as you could have been with instructions so there were a few more questions around it and that took a little bit of time. We always try to plan the best we can when we’re lesson planning but then stuff happens and we have to make decisions in the moment as to what to do. And often that looks like making decisions around what we can cut or what we can change if things veer from what we thought was going to happen in the plan.

So what do we do? What are some options here? Let’s say you’re looking for something to cut. Well maybe there’s a small piece in your lesson plan – perhaps a small section – it could be five minutes, it could be 10 minutes – that’s kind of nice information to share with the group but it’s not really related to a learning outcome. I mean, it was nice to put it in, you had time for it but if you cut it, it won’t really make a difference and maybe you know that you can give the information to the group later – handout, follow up email, whatever it happens to be. There’s something there perhaps that you can cut. And you can pre-think about that in your planning stage, of course, and even mark it, if you want to, in your lesson plan that if we don’t have time, we’re not going to do this thing or this whole section. So think about things in advance about what you can cut and then cut them in the moment. And of course, you’re not going to tell the group that. They don’t know that you’ve cut something, especially if it’s not something crucial that’s not related to an outcome.

Maybe there’s something that you can’t cut to save some time but you’re going to make a change behind the scenes in your own mind or in conversations with your co-facilitator about how you can change something. Let’s think back to the 1-2-4-All activity we just discussed. Say you’ve got that planned in your lesson plan, you know it’s going to take 20 minutes, and you really only have 15 – or maybe you only have 12 minutes [laughs] when it comes right down to it. You can probably still do that activity, but maybe you’re going to just do the one and the two and the all, but cut out the fours. Those are fairly easy changes that you can make in the moment where you just think, ‘OK, I know because I’ve planned and I’m ready. I know my lesson plan and what’s in it. I know I can cut that period with the foursome out of there because it’s not going to make a crucial difference to the results of that activity’.

So there might be minute or even major changes that you can make to some activities to do them in a slightly different way or in a very different way. All I really want you to do is just keep thinking about outcomes and aligning that with the changes that you want to make. You’ll know that if you change something to be a different result of that activity and it’s not then related to outcomes anymore, you have a problem. But if you can change the activity and the gist still happens, basically, with what the group needed to discuss or learn or be able to share with each other, then you’re good. So keep your outcomes focused, top of mind, as you go through. Absolutely.

Again I think there are pieces in the Episode 19 that I’ve talked about around this as well, so go listen there for some extra considerations around activities and timing as well.

The last thing I’ll say about during the workshop is take notes. If you have a physical copy of your lesson plan with you – this is what I do. I have a pen with me always, right? Like on my back table where I put the facilitator toolkit items and markers and pens and all that kind of stuff. So I often will have my lesson plan back there where I go back and check it. I’ve got a pen nearby and I will – at periodic points throughout the workshop – I will write in the actual time that we started the thing – you know, that segment of the lesson plan and that helps me think, ‘oh OK well I was 10 minutes behind what I thought it was going to be when I planned the session. And so instead of starting at 10:20, it actually started at 10:30’. That’s really good information. It doesn’t help you in the moment but it helps you after. Especially if you’re going to lead the workshop again, you’re going to want to keep those notes for yourself so that you can reflect on it and iterate it and make changes to your lesson plan so that you can facilitate it a little bit more perfectly the next time in terms of timing.

This is also really crucial if you are working with someone else or somebody else on your team or in your organization is going to facilitate the next version and you’re not going to be there. You are going to want to report back to the rest of your team about what happened in the workshop so that can help them when they go to facilitate the next version of it, if you’re working in a group. But help yourself absolutely if you’re a solopreneur doing this type of work, then you’re going to want to make those notes in the moment or make them right at the end of the day or the end of the session as soon as you can because you will forget and you want to help yourself out by making those notes.

This leads me to the after period for after you’ve facilitated the workshop or the session. Take time to reflect on the experience of it and think about all sorts of things, but of course you’re going to think about timing and how it went during the day. You’re going to make notes, as I’ve said, and you’ll probably want to go over any timing issues with any co-facilitators you’re working with, and have ideas that you can share with each other about how you could have done something better. Or did the group need something other than what you were doing with them at the time o would another activity serve the group better? It could be shorter, it could be longer, you know? So timing does come into our reflection about how the session went.

And you’re also going to mine the feedback forms that I hope you’re giving to participants to gather feedback on the session. You’re going to go through those forms for all sorts of reasons but one of them is to see if they’ve said anything about timing because sometimes participants do share that something was too fast, too slow, they’ll mention pacing and timing things in their feedback forms. We want to pay attention to that, don’t we? Because that does help us iterate the lesson plan for the next time and make a better workshop the next time we roll it out with a new group.

So those are some of my tips and strategies for you around what to do before, during, and after facilitating an in-person learning experience with a group.

Let’s go on now for a couple of points that might change slightly if we are facilitating virtually in platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Now I still want you to use a lesson plan to plan virtual sessions. That absolutely transfers over from the in-person mode to the virtual mode. We use the same type of document for both modes because they’re synchronous. They work the same way in terms of chunking out the time and the content and the activities in rows of a table.

There are a couple of things that I just want you to consider if you’re planning to facilitate in the virtual mode. One of them is to intentionally plan the time when people are coming into the room. Now we actually should be doing this for in-person facilitation as well, coming up with some sort of optional activity perhaps that people can do as they walk in the room, such as filling out a name tent or talking to people at their table because you’ve put conversation cards on the table or that kind of thing. We do think about the timing of the walk-in when people are coming into an in-person room, but in a virtual room I think it’s even more important because people can’t have those sidebar one-on-one conversations like they can in-person if they’re just coming in and putting their stuff down at the table and kind of turning to someone that’s sitting beside them and whatever. We have to plan so much more intentionally for a virtual session than we do for an in-person session to have something for the group to do as they come into the session.

Now this also reminds me that I have to tell you I do something called ‘the start before the start’, which is that I open the doors of the room 10 minutes early, and invite people to come 10 minutes early so they can start to get to know me, get to know other people in the room, and so on. And so I have an optional activity that I usually do with a group at that time and I vary those types of activities across the different types of things that I do.

So intentionally plan that kind of social ‘walk-in time’ when people are coming into the virtual room because you do have the group captive there, and it is a little awkward to not have something planned in terms of the timing at that stage. I do still see people starting their event at the top of the hour very formally, and I don’t like it [laughs]. To be honest, I don’t like it. I think we need to have fun with groups as much as we can and treat each other like real people. And the more that people can get to know me as a facilitator, as a real person on the other end of the computer in those informal moments that I’ve intentionally planned at the start of a session or just before it, I think that’s great. You might think differently. It’s OK to disagree with me but I think those timing pieces of mimicking the social – or replacing the social times that we have in person and doing it online are really, really important.

So think about times, even on the breaks and lunches and whatever, if you’re facilitating virtually, if you have to think more intentionally about timing and what to do in those particular times online.

The other thing we often think about in terms of being virtual with groups is the time it takes to use breakout rooms. Now, I am a very participatory facilitator. I always have a lot of things for people to do because I believe in active learning. If you do too, you’re probably going to use breakout rooms at some point and maybe you have been for years and you’ve perhaps learned this but if you haven’t it’s OK. It will take more time to be putting people in and out of breakout rooms for a couple of different reasons. Well, first, it’s the technology. We just have to wait for people’s computers to catch up sometimes for them to actually be able to get into the room [laughs a bit]. And then we have to remember that they haven’t met these other people, probably, yet in their breakout room especially if they’re coming to a workshop that involves people from many different organizations. They don’t know the people that they’re going to be in the breakout room with and so we often leave them a little bit of a buffer time, even if it’s just a minute, to meet the other people in the room before they start working on the activity.

Again, look at your lesson plan and think through every step of the way and think about the time it’ll take you to move people into breakout rooms and back and for them to talk with each other in the room before they get going on the activity, and build all those little pieces into your timing estimations so that you can try to get it as close to what is going to happen as possible.

The other thing I think about with virtual is that there may be new tools or new technologies that you’re using in your session that people might not be familiar with or that they’ll be very familiar with. So the more you know about who your learners are and their skills and their knowledge around tools and technology, the better you’re going to be able to estimate timing.

So for example I have access to the platform called Mural, and I sometimes use it with my groups. But I have to consider each new group that I’m working with to see if they’re going to be familiar with Mural and, for example, if I have to build in a little time for them to find their way around and to know how to use Mural. And for me to go through a little bit of a demonstration about how to use it. That all takes time for people to get situated in new tools and new technologies that they’ve never been in before. On the flip side, if they’re very familiar with something and they use it all the time, then you know that they’re going to be quite quick and they can just get into the activity and it’s all fine. And so your timing might be less because you have a very savvy group with that particular tool. So the more you know about your learners and who they are and what skills they have, for example, by doing pre-assessments with them and figuring out who they are and what they know, the more you’re going to be able to estimate time based on their skill levels and what you think they’ll be able to do in the actual session.

The last thing I’ll say about virtual facilitation as it relates to timing is that some people I know actually end their sessions 10 minutes before the top of the hour to give their participants time to get to their next meeting or to get off to lunch or whatever, because people do tend to drop off a few minutes early, I’ve found, at the end of sessions. And so if you want to give yourself a little bit of a buffer there, maybe ending 5 or 10 minutes before the top of the hour, that’s what you’re going to do in your lesson plan, is plan the end time of the session and then you can hit it.

Again, respect people’s time. Know that they probably need time for a bio break or that kind of thing, and just end a few minutes early – or make sure that you just still aren’t facilitating them through super meaningful, crunchy, juicy activities right to the 11th hour, you know, the end of the session. Get them a little bit of a winding down period at the end because you’re just going to assume that they might have to jump out early.

I think that completes the ideas I wanted to share with you around in-person and virtual. Again, my book Design to Engage has a lot of ideas around timing and timekeeping, and so if you don’t have that already it’s a great thing to go get to kind of fill in what I’ve talked about here. And of course it’s got so many other things in the book, going into lesson planning and how to write a learning outcome and all sorts of other things. And also as I said earlier you can go back to Choosing Activities, Episode 19, and dig into that one if you haven’t already, for more specific advice around activities, because as I said activities are really the thing that is kind of like a tipping point where if you’re going to add in a lot more activities because you’re trying to be more participatory in your sessions for your learners, that activities are kind of the thing that tips the scale towards needing more time and needing to think more intentionally about time and what to do about that. So that’s a great episode if you want to check that one out as well.

The couple last points I’ll make have to do with the e-learning mode. So this is asynchronous online learning. We do think about timing, of course, in this mode even though a facilitator isn’t present. The learners are learning alone in the e-learning mode, but we still have to think about the learners and who they are and how much time they have to engage in the learning experience. That becomes quite a real constraint for us in our work in learning design for the e-learning mode, because sometimes clients have said, ‘well, these learners only have half an hour to do this thing, or they only have 10 minutes to do this thing’. And so timing becomes a big thing we talk about in e-learning as we’re planning the design and storyboarding because we have to meet some sort of criteria around what the learners can and cannot do.

We also have tools in my company to estimate the amount of learner effort in terms of time for an e-learning course. We know how to plan for that so we have to think through, if we have a constraint around half an hour, well then we actually have to do the math as we’re designing the structure of the e-learning course and storyboarding it all out – writing the content, and developing the activities for it – we have to keep the learner effort time in mind very much then, because we have to match that constraint that we’ve been given by the client.

So our considerations about timing still exist when we’re designing for the asynchronous e-learning mode, they just happen differently because we’re not synchronously in-person or virtual with the group.

I hope this answers at least some and hopefully more of your questions around perfecting timing for and with your groups. Feel free, as I’ve said, to reach out and give me any feedback you’d like to about this episode, especially given the cultural considerations that are inherent within timing decisions.

I can’t always say that I’m a perfect timing expert myself, but I’m usually pretty close. And as with all of the things I do in this field, I keep on learning. And so if you have anything you want to share with me to help me expand my practice, I would love to hear from you. Thanks so much and I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode.

[Episode outro]
Beth
On the next episode of the podcast I talk with Matthew Rempel. Matt has a business called Strategy Made Simple and what he does is help social enterprises through business development and marketing challenges. We turned Matt’s expertise in branding and marketing to those of us who have businesses in the fields of facilitation, or learning design, or other similar fields. Matt and I talk about all sorts of things that we need to consider when thinking about our marketing efforts. Where do we start? How do we figure out what the value is that we are offering to our clients, and so much more. So catch us next time on the show. We’ll see you then.

[Show outro]
Beth
Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback, or submit ideas for future episodes visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!

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