PARA TEST Helping others as a remote Digital Champion: top techniques

This is our first guide to being a remote Digital Champion. In the coming days we'll be releasing guides to top tools and tech for remote Digital Champions, how to find people to help, online safety and more. This first guide looks at the essential techniques for supporting others remotely.

Helping people with digital skills remotely can be a very different kettle of fish to helping them face to face. Whilst some principles remain the same, such as being patient and avoiding jargon, there are other differences you should consider.

The essentials

• Focus and listen. Because there are fewer visual clues when teaching remotely, it can be easy to miss a subtle change in someone’s facial expression or tone of voice so it’s important not to get distracted. 
• Don’t dictate the online tool you use to help someone with digital skills. You may have a preference but experiment to see what works best for your learner.
• Email can be useful before or after a session for sending links, questions, guides etc but try not to use it whilst you’re helping someone as it can interrupt the flow.
• Location still matters for both you and your learner. It’s important for you both to find a place that can be relatively undisturbed and comfortable for the teaching to be a success.
• Go slowly and regularly check in that learner is keeping up as it can take longer to learn compared with face to face.
• Don’t try to do too much in one go and stick to your agreed session length. It might feel logical to try and cram as much learning into a session as possible. In fact, this could be counter-productive and leave your learner feeling confused and overwhelmed.
• Don’t use jargon.
• Encourage your learner to take notes as you go, giving them the time to do this.

Helping different learners

You might end up helping all sorts of different people. Remember, it's up to you who you help and it's OK to say no to someone if you feel that remote support will not work for their specific needs. There will be lots of other services or websites that you can refer them to such as the technology guides on the Digital Unite website.

Running sessions

“It’s important to help people feel comfortable with what they’re doing online before they actually do it. For example, ordering an online shop is a massive step for someone who has never done it before... Start by helping someone get familiar with the whole concept of online shopping to build their confidence. They can look around a supermarket’s website, comparing products... even create a shopping list they can use themselves or give to a neighbour. Then when they understand it a little more, they’ll feel ready to place an order.”

- Caspar, Remote Digital Champion