The model of Webinars is based on attendance to a seminar but online; that’s why they are also called Web-based seminars. Simple research on the Web can drive people to free or low-cost Webinars. A digital platform allows people to participate ubiquitously and synchronously in such an event. Besides, there are plenty of subjects. A main feature of Webinars is the massive number of attendees, generally with no fees and created as independent learning solutions. It makes it open. Participants can connect or download Webinar recordings using several devices, needing only a stable internet connection. It makes it mobile.
Webinars have been used primarily on high education and professional training. They increase in popularity even more after lockdowns due to Covid-19. Webinars represent an opportunity for professional development to overcome barriers because of their flexibility, time frames (usually one up to 2 hours), and focus on one specific subject. Attendees to a Webinar usually share an interest in the subject, so Webinars have the potential to broaden knowledge and interprofessional collaboration (Swords et al. 2017)
Some Webinars platforms allow presentation, video, screen sharing, chat, Questions/Answers sessions, Polls and calls to action to interact with participants. As webinars allow students to developed knowledge and skills (Gegenfurtner & Ebner, 2019), several professional associations accept them to fulfill Continuing Professional Development (CPD) requirements. It is now more common to find those associations suggesting membres strategies to improve learning through Webinars. Click the link to see an example from the University of Derby in the United Kingdom created by David Bryson (2020).
References:
- Swords, C., Bergman, L., Manji, A., Brenner, M., and Arora, A. 2017. Webinar Education in Otolaryngology: A systematic review. Morressier. https://doi.org/10.26226/morressier.5adde3c2d462b80290b59259
- Gegenfurtner, A. and Ebner, C. 2019. Webinars in higher education and professional training: A meta-analysis and systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Educational Research Review. 28 (Article 100293) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2019.100293
- David Bryson. (2020). Using webinars to support your continuing professional development. Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine. 43, No. 4 (222-224) https://doi.org/10.1080/17453054.2020.1816811
I also love webinars, especially recorded ones. Because I work full time, recorded webinars are perfect because I can watch it on my own time. I had interest taking some live webinars, but they occur in the middle of my work day, which causes a distraction and sometimes I have to host workshops for work. When I host workshops or webinars, I like to leave ample amount of time for participants to type in their questions or open up the floor to ask questions. At the start of the webinar, I ensure that every participant knows where the hands up button is. During the webinar, I periodically check if there are questions. Sometimes I am fortunate to have a colleague with me and one person would keep an eye on the queue. The reason why I put an emphasis on using the hands up button is because we are all attending this virtually and missing the in-person aspect. This allows a close resemblance as when we have workshops in person.
Hello Sarah,
I have also participated in some Webinars that use facilitators to introduce participation’ rules. It’s a good practice because the Subject Matter Expert (SME) can focus on his presentation. Still, the facilitator reminds people’s questions, engages with them in the chat or helps with polls or other required interactions. Like you, I like having access to the recording. You can clarify something that you miss, and even if you can’t enjoy the interactions, you can still get some information of your interest.
The company I work for, the British Council, needs to get 10,000 IELTS writing scripts a day every day graded to an exact and uniform standard, and has a marker cohort spread over every time zone to do this. It requires constant and continuous skills upgrading and updating for the markers and webinars are indispensable for this. As Elizabeth noted however, they do violate a central tenet of constructivist pedagogy, and there is little opportunity for learner-centered growth in knowledge.
Nevertheless, for getting key information out to as many people as possible they are hard to beat. Here are the best practices I see after having enjoyed many (and suffered a few!):
1. Pace is important – match it to the difficulty of the material,
2. Strong accents are an unneeded distraction,
3. Reinforce content with memorable examples,
4. Think carefully about what the audience will find useful and stay focused on that
Hello Gary,
I completely agree with you. One of the reasons why webinars help in professional development is that participants can keep updated with practices in the field. Webinars can also provide general information to let professionals better know a subject and then decide if they want to go deep in learning about it. As you suggested, those strategies are essential to keep participants engaged; however, the advantage of Webinars is that most of the audience is driven by intellectual curiosity.
I completely agree, Elizabeth. With the rapid move towards online learning due to the pandemic, I found that pedagogy was often the first to go (it was a pandemic though and we were all just holding on). Now that we’ve had a moment to reflect and gauge the positives and negatives around what happened during this time, I think a hybrid approach is where we want to land. Regardless of synchronous or asynchronous, educators still need to know their learners, create experiential learning, and provide opportunities to work with peers. If anything, I think the pandemic has taught us that we need human connection and although there are endless possibilities to webinar approaches, we still need design learning that holds space for interaction.
Some tools I use are: Padlets, wordles, break-out rooms, creating a task where participants have to come with something they’ve created (media) to share – ie photo walk, waterfalls of words in the chat are fun… and having students send me answers or best guesses in a private chat while others are thinking… (for our primary students that are so excited they call out the answers).
I love webinars for all the said reasons. Webinars are accessible; they can be recorded and watched later, they work with a small or large attendance. They are also relatively inexpensive to produce. Webinars can be an ideal learning solution; however, they’re not interactive. They can simulate a lecture if the presenter talks to the learning audience rather than with the learning audience. One tip for creating an engaging webinar is to leverage the full functionality of the webinar tool (e.g., Teams, Zoom). For example, include thoughtful polls, surveys, annotations. Features such as these pique the interest of the audience and keep them focused on the topic. Does anyone have any other best practices?
Hi Elizabeth,
We often include “annotation” interactions in our sessions so crafting a well-designed template to use on screen is important. For example, in one of our sessions, we use a staircase to illustrate that there are 3 steps in a framework and ask participants to add words on the screen to represent their ideas. At this point, we have not revealed what are the 3 steps yet so we ask participants to put their words anywhere on the screen while a producer who is in control of the slides moves the words under the appropriate step. To clarify, for each session, we always have a producer who is responsible for moving the slides, opening breakout rooms, managing the chat and all the other technical functions on platforms like Zoom while facilitators can fully concentrate on delivering the content and interacting with the audience.