A Guest Post by MMSA. When facilitating learning with very small groups, remember structures and facilitation methods that can keep you on track in either in-person or virtual settings.

There are four key actions you can take right now to boost the quality of your virtual meetings. Check them out here!

Over the past 18 months, everyone has become more comfortable online. People who formerly preferred conference calls and didn’t own a webcam became adept at seeing themselves on camera and even using emoji reactions. Let’s build upon that progress and improve your meeting facilitation so every virtual participant feels like your online meetings are a good use of time.

Designing online learning is not easy but it’s also not hard. Check out these clear tips on how to get started for yourself. AND take our quiz to find out your own Online PD SuperPower!

Virtual learning and facilitation is not going away. Now is a good time to reset and recalibrate your efforts to take the long view. By making a few shifts, you’ll be able to lighten your load, better care for yourself and facilitate better learning for your participants.

2020 has been one of the most traumatic years during our lifetimes. And we know that the immediate and long-term effects on our children and youth could become dire—especially when the 2020 anxieties are coupled with already-existing trauma or challenges. When facilitating youth programming remotely, try these 5 trauma-informed practices to support your participants.

Facilitating good virtual meetings and workshops takes planning and practice. Here are the essential tips, tried and true structures, routines and techniques that make virtual meetings effective and engaging—in a BINGO board :)

In the long list of lessons the pandemic has taught us, one is: No matter how much you prepare, you may never actually be ready. And, even though we may have prepared, we still have to be able to abandon our plans and readjust to a completely different context at the drop of a hat. Our team is excited to announce the launch of our new virtual learning platform, LEARN>Without Limits.

Life has changed so drastically for all of us in the past several months and has forced us to “set up shop” in our homes overnight!  Going virtual is the new order of the day and has challenged us to find resourceful ways to make the best of our circumstances. DWL team member Belinda Passafaro gives tips to maintain professionalism while working remotely.

Think about when you wanted to learn how to dice a fresh mango, how to launch your e-marketing campaign or how to facilitate a Zoom meeting for the first time. All of these things were “nice to know”s until they became “must know”s. And THAT is when you sought to learn them. That’s what adult learners do—we learn things we need to know, when we need to. Help your learners get the knowledge they need by starting your own online university.

Need help figuring out how to create an online professional development experience for your staff or network? We can help—starting with establishing your case for investing in online professional development now. If you need to communicate with your board, funders or partners that now is the time to invest in online professional development or that the funds currently tagged for programming (that isn’t occurring) should be reallocated to online PD, copy and paste today’s post into your own document to get started.

You can’t just take the in-person agenda and materials, pop them into a virtual space and then expect it to be just as amazing as it was in-person. But, you also do not have to scrap the full agenda and start over. Follow these simple steps to adapt an existing workshop agenda to the online environment.