Webinar on Online Learning and Teaching: A Reflexive Autobiography

Simona Lorenzini

December 3, 2014 marked my debut online. For the first time the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning offered an Advanced Teaching Workshop in a webinar format that I co-facilitated with my fellow Tyler Smith. Webinar: what is it? A friend of mine has suggested this definition: a seminar on the web. I think is the simplest and straightforward definition for a webinar. Personally, I only heard about webinars for the first time a few months ago when I started being interested in online education. As both teacher and researcher, I like challenging myself with new tools and resources and, following my curiosity, I have come across the virtual world of webinars. There is a mare magnum of webinars: you can find a webinar on almost anything, from education to marketing, from technological to cooking tutorials. And many of these webinars are completely free—a feature that speaks to the high level of “democracy” of such tools.

As a Yale Online Teaching Fellow, I had to take some webinars as part of my training for the webinar Tyler and I co-facilitated in December. I have to say that my first experiences with webinars were somehow discouraging. Even if the topic was of interest (mainly about education), I often felt overwhelmed by the content’s delivery. Many of these webinars were lectures of one or two speakers, with one person acting as moderator. After half an hour of talking and slide sharing – when you cannot actually see the speaker – my attention flagged and I started watching time, looking around, and eventually getting distracted. So, when it came to plan our webinar, Tyler and I agreed in approaching it as a traditional CTL workshop. That meant to keep it as interactive, dynamic, and engaging as possible. For me, this was the most challenging part of the webinar. You cannot have a sense of the importance of a physical interaction with the audience until you lack it. In a face-to-face environment, you can easily measure the level of attention of your audience and bring it back by eye contact, direct questions, or just simply by moving around the physical space. However, in a virtual space, everything becomes more difficult. So, the first thing to keep in mind was avoiding a lecture-style webinar. We did not want to lecture our participants about webinars and online learning. Instead, we presented ourselves as facilitators for a discussion about the costs and benefits of online teaching, and we started our webinar with a very successful icebreaker that asked our participants to share their previous experiences with online tutorials. The answers varied from ‘how to tie a bow’ to ‘how to fix a leaking faucet’; this way, we were able to put our participants at ease and open a discussion without presenting ourselves as “experts.”

Going through all the aspects of a webinar (from technical to pedagogical issues) was challenging and rewarding at the same time. I experienced the entire procoess as a learning experience for myself, strongly believing that doing something is the best way to learn something (a pearl of wisdom that comes from my parents).

And so the question arises: what did I learn? Here are my “pearls of wisdom” for developing and conducting a good webinar:

• Surf the net: you will find tons and tons of tutorials, tools, and materials (free!!) on the web. It is a good starting point, especially if you are a newbie.

• Choose the right platform: Google Hangout and Skype are just some of the platforms you can use for hosting a webinar. The good news: they are free. The bad news: they can allow a limited number of participants. Here you can find a list of the most reliable webinar platforms: http://webinar-services.no1reviews.com

• Learn the technology and become familiar with the platform: before the December webinar, I used Google Hangout in many pre-webinar meetings and with my family to become accustomed with tech troubleshooting and interactive apps.

• Work in a team: a successful webinar is often a team project. Even if you are the only facilitator/presenter, it is a good practice to ask for suggestion and help to your colleagues or friends. They can help you with resources, feedback, tech support, and rehearsals.

• Rehearse: before the event, you should rehearse with colleagues and/or friends (maybe from the same location and at the same time of your real event) to be sure that everything will go smoothly, and to allow yourself to feel confident with virtual interactions.

• Have a good lesson plan: you should set your goals and expectations from the very outset. This way the participants can follow you easily and be more focused.

• Treat your webinar like a face-to-face event/workshop: maybe it is the most challenging part because you miss the physical contact with your audience, and you cannot control its attention. But if you do not lose your participants along the way, you must remember that they are there. So…

• … engage your audience: you should avoid lecturing-style webinar by thoughtfully dividing your time between content delivering and interactive learning activities. Interactivity is a good strategy to promote engagement and attention; and engagement is fundamental for a successful webinar.

• Use the chat function to share documents/worksheets, website resources, and links with your participants: the chat app is an excellent tool for live Q&A, small group activities, video clips, and feedback. And last but not least…

• Keep it simple and short: especially if it’s your first experience with a webinar, do not entrap yourself in those cool apps that some platforms allow. Instead, go straight to your goals, deliver not more than two or three topics, and engage your audience in a lively discussion and interactive activity for no more than 50 mins.

The webinar tool is a very flexible technology and it can respond to different specific communicative purposes. It also allows you to break down time and space barriers, making it a more suitable choice in this age of tight schedules. At the same time, missing visual and bodily cues poses a challenge. In my personal experience, facilitating active participation and preventing participants’ distractions were the hardest obstacles to overcome. In a traditional f2f workshop, you can split your participants in small groups (even in pairs), easing the anxiety of talking in front of a large group. That is harder to accomplish in a virtual setting. Of course, you could call on people to speak, but the majority of them could not feel comfortable in being on the spot. This downside of the webinar was counterbalanced by the high appreciation and usage of the chat tool that, surprisingly or not, played an important part in our webinar.

Being an online teacher/presenter is demanding, challenging, and overwhelming in terms of lesson planning, setting clear goals, keeping your audience attentive. However, in the spirit of the CTL’s workshop, I found the December webinar on online teaching to be a stimulating learning experience that I had the privilege to share with my co-facilitator, with the staff of CTL, and, of course, with all of our participants whose precious feedback serves as a helpful tool to rethink and reshape future online workshops.

To my readers: Have you ever taken a webinar? Would you like to take one? I would really enjoy hearing your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below.