Now I’m no expert, but I have learned a thing or two about working with them. So here is my best advice for working with subject matter experts in your next learning event.

Subject Matter Experts — or SME’s — is just a fancy term for resource people, experts, panelists and others who make presentations as part of a webinar — or in “non-COVID times”, during a workshop or panel discussion at a conference.

When SME’s do their job well, they share valuable specialized knowledge, frameworks, wisdom and skills with your learners that they can’t find elsewhere. When things don’t go as well, however, SME’s may show up with a recycled presentation, not really know the audience’s needs, and subject your participants to “death by PowerPoint” with long presentations that don’t contribute to the overall events’ objectives.

To work effectively with Subject Matter Experts, I’d recommend the following tips:

1. Orient your SME’s to how their presentation will contribute to the overall design of the event. Share a summary of the key design parameters — what you know about the participants, the situation that calls for the learning, and any findings from your Learning Needs and Resources Assessment (LNRA) that will help them customize their presentation.

2. Situate their contribution within the other learning tasks for that webinar or event. Often SME’s contribute to the ADD portion by providing new information, case studies, stores and examples. But they should be aware how their contribution connects to the other components of your design, notably the Anchor, Apply and Away steps. If you can, invite them to help you craft meaningful Application tasks (e.g., case studies, problem solving, role-plays) that will help the participants to engage with the concepts and/or skills from the presentations. 

3. Ask your presenters to prepare a presentation of no more than 15 minutes, with at least 15 but no more than 30 slides (i.e., an average of 30 seconds to 1 minute / slide).  This is probably shorter than what they would do in a face-to-face event, but probably sufficient for your audience on a. webinar. This also gives space for the other components of the learning program.

4. Ask them to introduce their presentation with an open-question that gives the participants something to think about as they are watching. (e.g., “As you watch this presentation on fundraising techniques, consider what techniques you’ve tried before and which might be new to you.”). Then, after their presentation, begin a Q&A  by debriefing on the participants answers to the introductory, open questions.  Alternatively, ask your SME to develop a reflection question to ask the audience after their presentation.

5.  Invite them to save the more technical or more detailed information for a supplementary handout and if possible, send them to the participants before the webinar. Failing that, you can send it after the webinar. 

6. Encourage your SME’s to build in periodic pauses for questions of clarification and/or polls or surveys of the participants during their presentation. 

7. Hold a “tech-check” or “dry-run” practice session with your SME’s a few days before your webinar to make sure that their internet connections are strong enough, and that they have a good technical set up for producing the webinar: Lights? Camera? Microphone? Headset? Action!

8. Make sure that they know how to use the webinar platform: how to turn their mic and camera on and off, how to share screens, how to follow the chat.

9. Ensure that they have most recent version of the webinar software downloaded and installed on other computer.

10. Use your technical “dry run” to do a high-level walk through of the overall learning design and the content of each SME’s presentation. This will help them customize their presentations and make connections with the rest of the program.

11. Clarify with your SME before the webinar about whether they will let you share a copy of their slides, handouts and/or video of the webinar. They may prefer not sharing their PPT slides, but perhaps would be okay with sharing a PDF of some key concepts.

12. AND ALWAYS! Always! Review and edit your presenter’s slides before the webinar to ensure that they have just enough content, and that their PPT slides follow good visual design principles.

Hopefully these guidelines will help you make the most of your SME’s expertise and create an engaging and effective learning experience for everyone. But please let me know how it goes.