Though your workshops may be shorter than a full-length course, you'll still need to ensure that the value is high and the ROI is strong for the time students spend with you.

Here are the guiding principles for your workshop design:

✅ Dive into the meat right away - talk about your background, what makes you experienced, and why you're teaching this topic for ~5 minutes total. Students are there to learn.

✅ Be highly tactical - Share real stories, screenshots and examples that show your real-world expertise. Avoid "fluff" and "big ideas" - instead provide concrete examples to demonstrate a concept in practice.

✅ Be interactive - Take advantage of the live aspect and ask questions for your students to answer in the chat. Remind students to put their questions in the chat throughout the lesson and answer questions often with practical detail and nuance. Implement State Changes (explained later in this guide) often throughout the workshop.

✅ Be a confident presenter - be competent with Zoom (no technical issues, schedule time for a practice session with a trusted peer if you need it), have high quality slides, and be articulate.

✅ Focus on providing access to you, the instructor - do this throughout the lesson by designing an interactive lesson and through offering structured and dedicated Q&A time at the end of the workshop (ie 30 minutes just for Q&A time).

Here is an example workshop agenda, demonstrating high ROI, interactivity, and tactical outcomes for students.

From Persuasion for Designers by Catt Small

When hosting your live sessions, avoid monologuing or lecturing for 60-90 minutes at a time. This means that in a typical workshop, there's no need for ultra-fancy slide decks with 100s of slides.

It's a common misconception that you need to cram more information to make the workshop "worth it" for students - don't fall into this trap.

Instead, design effective lessons by building your workshops around 2-3 main learning objectives or topics. Using the "I do, We do, You do" lesson structure to ensure the lesson is effective and interactive.

Adapted from the article originally written by Wes Kao and featured in her blog.

Student attention is earned, not given. The moment you accept that, you can plan for holding the attention of the attendees in your workshop. And holding their attention can be hard, especially on Zoom, where sitting still and staring at a screen for hours+ is tough.

State changes include:

Adapted from the article originally written by Wes Kao and featured in her blog.

The best instructors spend 80% of their time on the how — not the what or why. This is what separates courses that feel meaty and actionable from ones that leave you thinking, "I already knew that." Your students don't need more convincing that what they're learning matters. They need to see exactly how you do it.

Wes Kao calls this the Super Specific How: instead of describing best practices in the abstract, you show your actual work.

Examples do the heavy lifting here. They give students 10x more tactical information than any explanation could, and they make "great" concrete and imitable rather than vague and aspirational.