Four Things I Learned about Using Webinars for Teaching and Learning

Tyler Smith

In December, CTL fellow Simona Lorenzini and I co-facilitated a pair of webinars on the use of webinars in online learning. In a post on this blog last month, Simona reflected on our planning process. We had fun and learned a ton in our preparation for and facilitation of the webinars. We got a lot of it right, too: we produced a goal-driven lesson plan and rehearsed ahead of time; we designed ice-breakers and activities to keep our participants engaged; we were punctual in starting and ending; and we accounted for digital fatigue and distractibility by keeping the meeting short and sweet. But would we do it all over again in exactly the same way? Absolutely not. In this post, I’d like to explain some of what we learned along the way.

The webinar model most people are familiar with is focused on content delivery and usually involves one or more presenters, a behind-the-scenes navigator/troubleshooter/producer, and a listening audience. Because we were working with a smaller group and wanted to mimic the seminar-style atmosphere of a typical CTL Advanced Teaching Workshop, we tried to operate in a more collaborative, interactive mode. We were surprised to find, from the post-workshop feedback we received, that the most effective and appreciated moments in our webinars happened when Simona and I were “delivering content” rather than facilitating discussion. The takeaway: Webinars work best for sharing well-defined content with a crowd.

We offered the webinar twice, each time to a group of about a dozen participants. These upper limits were partly due to the limits imposed by Google Hangouts and partly because we thought that between ten and fifteen participants would be the sweet spot for a seminar-esque conversation. We bumped up against a significant challenge, however, in that we were working with groups of people without significant shared histories. This circumstance would also have been true had we met in person, of course, but we discovered that it is more difficult to “break the ice” online than in person. The takeaway: Collaborative webinars work better for people who have a shared history.

Though Simona and I spent a lot of time crafting our learning goals and a lesson plan, our meeting was not structured around a single, collaborative task. We might have been able to get away with throwing a bunch of strangers together for a general conversation if we each had a specific role and were collaborating on a specific task, like building a website or organizing a conference. But we wanted to facilitate a general discussion about webinars—when they might be useful in teaching, and what their advantages and disadvantages might be—as well as give our participants a first-hand experience of what it might be like to participate in a collaborative webinar. The range of questions we were interested in engaging might have worked well in a seminar, but felt in this medium like waffling around without focus. The takeaway: Webinars work best for groups of people who have a single task that can be accomplished in a compact timeframe.

In the early stages of planning, the idea of discussing webinars in a webinar seemed like a fun way to model the best practices we were promoting. As we neared the event, it turned out that this was our only “Really Compelling Reason” for having this discussion online rather than in a seminar room. We weren’t in a situation where participants were geographically dispersed, nor did weather conditions, physical disabilities, travel times, or financial considerations pose obstacles to our coming together. The conversation we were having didn’t require us all to be on our computers (e.g., manipulating data on a spreadsheet or composing a jointly-authored text). Had we met in a physical classroom, though, we wouldn’t have experienced the weight of these lessons as immediately and memorably as we did. The takeaway: educators should only opt for online meetings when they can say why a webinar better suits their participants and goals than a face-to-face meeting.  

In the feedback we collected, our participants appreciated first-hand perspectives on the tools of a webinar and the immersive dynamic that wouldn’t have been possible had we simply discussed these lessons in the abstract. But a part of us also found the form and the content to be uncomfortable bedfellows. Webinars are exciting and efficient vehicles for some kinds of teaching and learning scenarios. By preparing for them, teachers are learning to be more focused, efficient, and accessible. But webinars can’t do the same kinds of reflective, interactive, relationship-building work as a seminar or a workshop, and it would be unrealistic to expect them to. This is worth remembering at a time when some entrepreneurs and proponents of online learning are pushing to “unbundle” or even eliminate bricks-and-mortar universities as loci for learning.

Five Secrets for Creating Effective Slides

Namratha Vedire

From cave paintings and hieroglyphics to modern day video conferencing, human beings have invented different ways to communicate visually with each other. In today’s technology saturated world, PowerPoint presentations have become the most commonly used method to visually convey ideas. Unfortunately, their pervasiveness has also made PowerPoint the most abused tool. Thanks to inbuilt templates and the largely design-agnostic masses, we not only tolerate but have come to accept badly designed presentations. Not surprisingly, skeptics and cynics commonly label it a crutch. As teachers, academics and researchers, we lean quite heavily on this crutch. And even worse, accept poorly designed presentations as the norm.

As an engineer, and a theorist at that, I have sat through my fair share of classes and talks featuring downright bad presentations. Yet, I firmly oppose the idea of labeling PowerPoint as a crutch and refuse to put up with poorly designed slides anymore. I believe that when used well, the simple constructs that PowerPoint provides can create powerful and moving presentations. Don’t believe me? Al Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” is an adapted and edited version of his PowerPoint presentation. Now, you and I might not have Mr. Gore’s resources when it comes to creating our presentations, but there are a few global design principles you can use to make your slides stand out.

In this blog post, I have limited myself to 5 ideas to make your slides compelling, which are easy to adopt when making new presentations or editing those already built.

1. Ideate - Finding Non-Cliché Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. But, we rarely look beyond PowerPoint’s inbuilt clipart gallery full of cliché images like the one below showing a baton being handed off for, say, teamwork. Even if we do turn to Google images for fresh visuals, it is often hard to cull the plethora of search results for an image that fits our need. For instance, consider that you need to replace the cliché teamwork image. Before you even open your browser to find an image, employ a method called Ideating.



Ideating is a way to systematically brainstorm and open your mind to different possibilities by listing all words/phrases/analogies you can think of for your key word; here our key word is “teamwork.” Below is one instance of me ideating for teamwork.



From the above process I could now choose a picture of ants or an orchestra or a team of superheroes—say, the Avengers—as my stand-in for the cliché image depending on what works best for my presentation. Now I can turn to Google and find a focused, copyright-free image. I chose ants and I particularly liked this image.



2. Data

There are three cardinal rules while designing a data slide:

i. Pick the right tool for the job.

Determine what relationship your data portrays and then choose the tools that highlight that aspect. Some examples:



ii. Highlight what is important.

Use differentiating colors or animation to highlight the important data points/ deviations from the standard. This is a much better tool than relying on your laser pointer to draw focus because there are no uncertainties with runaway pointers. It is controlled and you already know how it will play out.

iii. Tell the truth.

I cannot stress this enough—ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH. Use the above two points to tell the truth and communicate effectively the point you wish to make.

3. One Message per Slide

Limit yourself to conveying one message (concept/ idea) in a slide. While it is okay to have overview slide to introduce your talk or section, keep to one concept in the slide. Strictly enforcing this rule should stop you from putting too much text, graphs, images or all of them on one slide.

4. Use Relationships

After isolating the one message you want to show in the slide, it is important to represent the message clearly. All I want to say on the subject, I learnt with http://www.duarte.com/diagrammer.

5. Slide Master

If you are a certified PowerPoint expert, you still might not be aware of all the handy features of PowerPoint’s Slide Master. The Slide Master is the global slide that can control Font, Color Scheme and Layout of all your slides at once. Anything you add (remove) here appears (disappears) on every slide – think logos, background color, header and footer. Learn more about accessing and editing your slide master here.

Once in the slide master view, in addition to adding global visual elements, consider adding a grid to help keep a uniform layout for your slides. Create the grid using the line tool in PowerPoint. Once you are done creating you slides, just delete the grid from the master and you are left with a consistent presentation. Explore more layout options here. As an example, I created this grid:



Setting your color scheme and choosing your font and font size is easy with the slide master. When choosing colors, keep in mind that some of your audience might be colorblind. Make sure there is enough contrast between your background and main text/ images. For color inspirations, check out paletton.

For fonts, there are a lot of options and, as I have come to realize, the choice is very personal. In addition to setting theme fonts, the master slide is a great place to delete the second, third, fourth and fifth levels of text (bullet) indents so you don’t use them to make text heavy slides. To enhance the clarity of your text, err on keeping the size medium to big. A rule of thumb to know when your text size is too small, step 2.5 feet away from your computer and if you cannot read the text – it is probably too small. For inspirations, look at fonts here.

It is important to remember that just like any other software package, PowerPoint is only as powerful as you make it. This post was written with the intent of making you aware of tips and tools to push PowerPoint’s effectiveness and enable you to create powerful presentations.

Putting the "Active" in Active Learning

Becky Van den Honert

Think of a few of your worst classes in high school or college. What made them so awful? What about your favorite classes? Why did you love them? When I think back, I remember professors that showed their passion for the material, challenged me to think in a different way, and didn’t just regurgitate facts from a textbook.

Today, I am a Psychology PhD student. I’m studying how your brain makes memories, so the topic of what helps people learn is near and dear to my heart. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about “active learning” and why it seems to work so well. Defined broadly, active learning is an approach to teaching that engages students through reading, writing, discussion, problem solving, and other sorts of activities. Almost by definition, a lecture does not fall into this category. This is where I start to get uncomfortable. Some of my all-time favorite classes have been lecture-based. Is it really the case that classes based on active learning are better than those fantastic lectures? I don’t think so.

Why do certain lectures work very well and others don’t? It has to do with why I think active learning approaches are so effective.

Below are three major factors that will improve students’ retention of information.

1.     Engagement. Students have to pay attention and fully process information they encounter in order to remember it.

2.     Integration. In order to learn, students must integrate new information into things they already know. Having a way to organize information is what turns it into knowledge.

3.     Remembering. Merely being reminded of something by hearing or reading it again will do very little to improve a student’s memory. Instead, if they voluntarily remember something (e.g., by quizzing themselves), they’ll be better able to use that information down the road.

Active learning capitalizes on all three of these things.

An activity is likely to boost students’ engagement in a number of ways. Maybe they wake up a bit by having to interact with other students. Maybe they see a real-world application and so are motivated to pay attention. Maybe the activity requires that they process some information more deeply than they would if you just told them a list of facts. But a good lecture can do all of these things too. A good story told in a history class, for example, can wake you up, can make you see real-world applications, and can be thought-provoking enough to make you process the lecture in a deep way.

A well-designed activity can also help students integrate new information with what they already know. Maybe they are forced to make connections to last semester’s material? Maybe they’re asked to relate what they’ve learned to their daily life. But again, a good teacher can organize and deliver their lecture in a way that makes you do this in your own mind.

Finally, an activity might help students remember information that they wouldn’t otherwise think of on their own. Maybe they’re asked questions that force them to recall the lessons from last week? Maybe the activity reinforces something they just learned. You won’t be surprised, now, when I say that a lecture can accomplish the same thing. Don’t forget, lecturers can pose questions. They can even support a small amount of discussion.

I worry that the phrase “active learning” makes us forget that what counts is that students’ minds are what are active. An activity that doesn’t increase engagement, integration, or remembering will be as ineffective as a boring speaker. It might just be that including certain activities in a class is among the easiest ways to create an active mind.

So take heart if you get nostalgic when you think of your favorite teachers who “just lectured.” They weren’t doing anything wrong, they were just exceptional at teaching the traditional way.