Who says that your course has to be online?
So this week we are talking all things Live Workshops.
This week I’m in London, and tomorrow I am running a live course creation workshop. So it’s the perfect time for us to talk about running your own live workshops.
Disclaimer: I’m not talking about when you get hired to stand and speak for an hour. That is a speech, not a workshop, and not a course.
A course requires them to have some participation of some sort, they do something.
And it should have some feedback mechanism. So if you have a speaking event, that’s not a course.
Instead, we’re talking about running live workshops, when you take your course and you teach it live.
And because it’s a course, and you are still trying to get the same results, it works the same way.
So, if you are planning a live workshop, here are some of the things you should think about.
1. Get really clear on what you want them to achieve.
This is no different to writing your online chunks. What do they need to be able to do or know by the time they have finished your workshop? If you don’t get really clear in advance on an outcome, it’s very easy to get distracted. It’s much easier to get distracted in a live workshop because you have REAL people talking to you.
You can end up on a heap of different tangents, and I swear teaching adults, is like trying to herd cats.
So get really clear on the outcomes.
2.Follow your process.
Write some content, teach them in story, give them something to do, so that they have to interact.
Give them time for this. Give them plenty of time to take action in class. This will take longer than you think it will.
Make sure you have allowed time in your workshop to allow them to implement, and be generous with the time, allow a more than you thought it would take… because they will need it.
3. Feedback!
Because you are face to face feedback is vital and really worthwhile. Now that they have implemented it’s time to give them feedback.
This can come in lots of different formats. You could walk around the classroom and talk to them one on one, although this takes a bit of time. What I would suggest is group discussion is great for this. Pull the group back together and get them to discuss what went well and what didn’t go well.
All of those things are things that we did in your chunk writing for your online course. All the steps are still the same.
But for a live workshop,
a) allow more time than you think it’s going to take and
b) you can interact on such a great level to build into your content.
These live workshops work for just about anything. So if you have written an online course, have you considered running one locally, as a live workshop?
Take part of the course, maybe just one chunk and teach it live. Get them to interact, get them involved, get them to do something on the day so they walk away with real outcomes, with tangible results.
I’d love to hear from you.
Do you think your subject works for live workshops? Have you run live events in the past?
Jump into the comments below and tell us all about them.