Five Best Practices for Online Workshops Targeted Towards Millennial Students

Some college graduates and current undergraduates from the millennial generation have short attention spans. This weekend, my husband and I will facilitate a "College Prep Boot Camp" for high school seniors.

There are certain aspects of this generation that we have to take into consideration when planning this event. I am a college professor and my husband teaches high school, therefore we have very interesting conversations about students from the millennial generation before and during college.

While planning for the workshop last weekend, I found an article from Litmos.com titled, "5 Tips to Design Effective Training for Generation Y". This article focuses on online workshop facilitation for millennial students (which we may consider in the next few months). According to this article, these are five things to consider before you build an online training course for students of this generation:

1. Keep training short & to the point.
   
   
2. Good communication tools within the training system are a must. Messaging at a minimum!
   
   
3. Community is important. Build forums & discussion groups around topics.
   
   
4. No one likes to be told what to do, especially Gen Y. Make sure your training 'guides' thinking rather than telling them how it is.
   
   
5. Incorporate the big picture. Generation Y are very interested in their part in it, and more importantly how they can change it!

I will definitely take these into consideration when planning for my online course next semester.