Why nobody asks questions in your online session, and how to get them

You finish a section, stop, and ask if there are any questions. Nobody says anything. You wait a moment, say "great", and move on.

The trouble is that silence means two opposite things. It might mean everyone followed. It might mean half of them lost you twenty minutes ago and have stopped trying. From where you sit, they look and sound exactly the same.

Duke's Center for Teaching and Learning named the pattern early in the move online, writing that video meetings lead to

"fewer moments when students feel comfortable enough to [ask] questions or offer opinions"

Duke Center for Teaching and Learning, Too Much Zoom? (2020)

The quiet is the people watching deciding that asking costs more than staying lost. You can change what it costs.

Why people stay quiet

Asking a question online costs more than it does in a room. You have to find the unmute button, interrupt the person presenting, and be the one who didn't get it, out loud and in front of everyone. In a room you can catch the presenter's eye, or lean over and ask the person beside you. Online, those small, cheap ways of asking are gone, and only the expensive one is left.

The presenter loses something too. In a room you can see faces. Presenting a screen, you are usually looking at your own screen, and the people watching are a list of names.

So the fix is not to ask "any questions?" more often. It is to make answering cheaper, and to ask in a way that gets a real answer.

Seven ways to hear from them

1. Wait longer than feels comfortable

This is the oldest finding on the subject and still the most useful. In two decades of classroom research, Mary Budd Rowe found that teachers typically wait one second or less after asking a question before they fill the silence themselves. When the wait went up to three seconds or more, answers got longer, fewer questions went unanswered, and students started contributing without being asked.

The pause that matters as much is the one after somebody answers. Wait there too, and others add to it. Three seconds of silence on a call feels very long. Count it anyway.

Source: Rowe, M. B. (1986). Wait Time: Slowing Down May Be a Way of Speeding Up! Journal of Teacher Education, 37(1), 43–50.

2. Ask a question that has an answer

"Any questions?" asks people to admit they are lost. "Which part should I go over again, the filter or the formula?" asks them to pick one. Specific questions are easier to answer and harder to let pass in silence, and they tell you exactly where the gap is.

3. Make answering cost almost nothing

A reaction, a thumbs up, one word in the chat. Ask for something quick: "Put a 1 in the chat if that worked for you, a 2 if it didn't." The quiet people who would never unmute will press a button, and a room full of 1s is information that silence never gave you.

4. Plan check-ins, not one question time at the end

A single Q&A at the end arrives after the confusion has piled up. Decide in advance where the hard parts are and stop there, briefly, every time. People learn that there will be a moment to ask, so they stop trying to find the right time to interrupt.

5. Name the hard part yourself

"This is the step most people get stuck on." Saying it makes being stuck normal, and it gives people permission to say "yes, me." It also tells you where to slow down before anyone has to ask.

6. Let them show you, not tell you

A lot of questions on a shared screen are about where: which button, which line, which number. Describing a place on somebody else's screen is hard ("the third row, no, the other one, above the green bit"), and that difficulty alone stops people asking. If they can point at the thing they mean, the question is half asked already.

7. Take questions privately, answer them publicly

Some people will message you directly when they would never ask in front of everyone. Invite that, then answer the question for the whole room without saying who asked. Everyone else who had the same question gets the answer too.

How Quisnap helps

Quisnap is a screen share built for one person presenting to people who need to follow. A few things in it come from exactly this problem:

• They answer without unmuting. Anyone watching can send a face the whole room sees, so "did that make sense?" gets an answer back without anybody having to speak.
• They point at what they are stuck on. A dot with their name on it appears on your screen, on the thing they mean, so the question arrives attached to what it is about.
• Hands wait their turn. Raised hands queue up, so you can see who is next instead of guessing who spoke first.
• You see the whole room. Who is watching, whose hand is up and who is talking, in one window beside what you are presenting.

In short

• Wait three seconds after you ask, and again after somebody answers.
• Replace "any questions?" with a question that has an answer.
• Give people a way to answer that costs one click.
• Stop at the hard parts you planned, not only at the end.
• Say out loud which part people usually find hard.
• Let people point at what they mean.
• Take questions privately and answer them for everyone.