Learn About Making Webinars Work!
Greeting students in online webinar
Making Webinars Work: The coronavirus pandemic has changed life as we have known it. This is especially true in the world of education and training and Making Webinars Work.
As organizations shift from instructor-led classrooms to virtual webinars, many are struggling with the transition due to a lack of experience and understanding about how to make webinars effective.
Webinars are not simply virtual classrooms. They pose a different set of challenges and offer some unique benefits besides avoiding travel and socializing during a pandemic.
Based on many expert opinions, I have assembled some of the best practices for online training to make webinars work as learning events. I hope these will assist those who are now forced by circumstances to conduct training virtually for the foreseeable future.
Best Practice #1: Prepare a separate instructional design plan for webinars
Many training organizations scrambling to replace their instructor-led seminars with webinars wrongly assume that the two are interchangeable and that they can simply have instructors deliver the same content in the same way as they always have. This turns out to be a major fallacy. Online webinars can certainly recreate a classroom environment, but the remote nature of the interaction requires different instructional strategies and delivery styles. Take the time to carefully analyze existing classes to see how best to translate them into webinars.
One key issue is to manage time to maximize participants’ attention. While classroom training may consume an entire day, online learning should be broken into smaller chunks of about 2-3 hours per session. It is difficult for learners to maintain their attention and interest when webinars drag on too long. Organize each session around a single skill or competency and provide a clear learning path to master new skills.
A related issue to watch out for is relying on lengthy lectures to present the content. While an in-person lecturer can liven the presentation with body language and physical context, the online lecturer typically has their voice alone, unless also using video. In a webinar, lecturing for more than 10 minutes or so without a break is an invitation for your audience to lose focus and tune you out.
Best Practice #2: Create a supportive online learning community
It is important to provide learners with a rich and supportive learning community to mitigate the loss of close personal interactions that are the hallmark of instructor-led classes. The best way to do this is to use both synchronous and asynchronous features of webinars. The time that learners spend together online should maximize interactions among learners and between them and the instructor. Allow for plenty of discussion and Q&A and encourage learners to share their personal experiences.
The time between webinar sessions should include both pre and post-session assignments, including small group activities that allow learners to collaborate between webinar sessions. Design pre-work to provide foundational knowledge and tap into personal experience related to the subject matter. The post-work should encourage application of new skills in the context of people’s work. Action learning projects are a good way to test concepts and gain experience with new skills.
For longer courses, the online learning community can be extended even beyond the life of the program. Learners in a cohort can continue to share experiences in a community of practice long after they have completed training, thus deepening their learning and ensuring better transfer of skills.
Best Practice #3: Set clear expectations for course completion
While we should always set clear expectations for learning, it is particularly important for webinars to spell out in detail all the expectations, including assignments in and out of the webinar, requirements for successfully completing the class and location of needed resources. Announce upcoming assignments in advance and provide regular reminders through discussion boards and chat to help keep learners on track. A course syllabus with weekly assignments is a big help to keep participants on track. While some webinars require a capstone final project, it is best to also have interim weekly projects to keep learners on track. If they only need to complete a final, they may be tempted to wait till the last minute to begin.
When an assessment is part of the course requisites, make sure that the passing score requirements are clearly explained, along with test administration and reporting procedures. If testing will be done online, make sure participants know what they need to do to access and complete assessments.
Best Practice #4: Use a variety of instructional methods and activities
Good instructional design relies on a wide variety of methods and activities to promote learning. Since no one method produces superior results in all cases and since learners tend to have unique learning styles, using a variety of methods and activities appeals to all types of learners and keeps webinars from turning into dull “talking head” presentations. Besides tried and true methods like role play, case study, discussion and gaming, webinars offer their own unique potential tools, such as: chat, polling, screen sharing, video demonstrations, whiteboards, digital reference libraries and breakout groups. Utilize all the features included with the webinar software tool you are using, not just the obvious. Most webinar tools today offer much more than just static two-way communication, yet many of the advanced features are underutilized.
When it comes to practice activities, utilize a variety of individual, group and breakout formats, depending on the topic and class size. For individual work, provide a downloadable student workbook that participants can use to capture notes. For large group activities, use the chat, whiteboard and audio-visual features of the software to allow participation and capture key points. For small group activities, use breakout sessions to allow smaller group of participants to discuss issues in detail. They can then report out their findings to the rest of the class.
Best Practice #5: Keep group sizes small to encourage interaction
The temptation is to fill webinars with masses of people, since it’s so easy for them to join a webinar from wherever they maybe. You’ve probably attended online sessions that had hundreds of participants and you quickly learned that it would be a one-way presentation – lecture with PowerPoint. They mute the participants and chat is confined to the most obvious questions. These large group webinars may be useful for conveying important information, but they do not provide a productive learning environment.
For effective learning, limit enrollment to about 15-20 students. This size allows for greater participation and individualization of the learning experience. To promote even more interaction, use smaller breakout groups of 3-5 to conduct activities and discussions. This allows learners to create meaningful connections with other participants and to engage with the subject in a more applicable way.
Small groups also allow for much greater interaction between the learners and the instructor. It’s important for instructors to foster personal relationships with students and to make themselves available for individual consultation outside of class. Personalized responses to student posts also helps to create a positive learning relationship.
Best Practice #6: Embrace the technology
Whatever software tool you may be using, whether it’s teleconferencing standards like Skype or Zoom, or dedicated webinar software like Connect or WebEx, it is important to become master of your software as well as master of your content. If you are lucky enough to have a producer to assist you, that helps with assuring the software performs as intended. They can handle course navigation and chat features for the instructor.
If you are a solo act, as many webinistas are these days, it behooves you to learn the software inside out so you can respond in real time to technical issues that come up and can fully exploit all the features of your chosen tool. As an example, some webinar tools allow you to create breakout groups for small group activities like discussions and role plays. Knowing how to use these tools is paramount to successfully deploying them in a webinar. Don’t try learning how to do it while presenting to a group of learners. Know your software and prepare in advance.
Best Practice #7: Learn from Experience
Too many training webinars are one-time events with little preparation and no follow-up. Such a mindset detracts from our ability to improve based on experience. Since we are moving into an online, virtual world, it is important to improve our ability to navigate this new frontier and use it to bring learning to more people. Besides reflecting on our own performance in webinars, it is important to get feedback from participants using tools like post-webinar surveys and discussion boards. Attach a survey to the end of a webinar so participants can give immediate feedback about their experience.
To gauge whether participants have applied any of their new skills and with what effect, send out follow up surveys several weeks after the webinar. For high stakes webinars, follow up may even include calculating the cost-benefit of providing online training. While the current appeal of webinars is their low cost compared with classroom training, we have yet to fully capture the benefits of online training, both for our learners and for training professionals entering a new virtual reality that is not likely to diminish, even after the pandemic passes. Making Webinars Work always works!
Be sure to listen to Dr. Ford’s podcast: “Making Webinars Work: Best Practices for Online Learning”
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