To be quite honest, I wasn't confident how well this would work. It was clear to me that I would have to get a few things right for this to work - and then trust the participants to work well together without me eavesdropping (as I usually do when we are working together in the same place).
So I had to be very clear in my own mind, both what they needed to know before the exercise, and precisely how I was going to instruct them to do it.

In the event, the session went very well. It was slightly unnerving to put them into groups and then simply wait, trusting them to make good use of the time. But I had decided not to go around the rooms, as I thought that would be disruptive and distracting.
So it was a great relief when they came back to the plenary session, and told me how valuable the exercise had been, and what they had learned from it. It is a great credit to the professors concerned that they were able to practice what is essentially a face-to-face skill in a virtual environment, give each other feedback, polish their skill, and generate and share learning. I think that was a lot to expect of them, and they rose to the challenge really well.

Now that I know that we can do serious skills practice, the benefits of relatively short (2 hour) modular sessions that people can do from their own office or home, and which I can facilitate without needing to travel and be put up in hotels, are very clear. So not quite a complete Zoom convert, but at least a believer in richer approach to mixed delivery.
(images courtesy Chris Mongomery, Austin Distel and Bruno Cervera, respectively, from Unsplash)
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