Tips for Giving Your Webinars Wow Factor
By Becky Pluth
Have you caught the webinar wave? More and more educators are harnessing the power of the webinar format to reach a larger audience at a lower cost than classroom experiences. Unfortunately, many webinar hosts fail to create interactive sessions to keep the attention of their participants which lowers the impact on learning and retention. Follow these tips to create webinars that wow.
Assuming that a training slide deck used in a regular classroom can be put online and called a webinar is a huge mistake. I have learned that lecturing with PowerPoint® on the computer not only enables inertia, it can drive people to other distractions. In a classroom, there is automatic interaction and an ability to connect with others. The best webinars try to replicate that people connectivity as much as possible by using the whiteboard, text chat, polling, and other tools available on your platform.
Not all synchronous training is alike and getting a good feel for what is out there can help in your planning process. Before designing your own, attend webinars on different platforms that are of varying lengths. This will allow you, as an instructional designer, to get the feel for different course lengths, what can be accomplished in a time frame, and how draining it can be on a learner.
Based on my experiences with webinars and research I've done, the average length of time a learner stays engaged before getting distracted and begins a new task is 4 minutes. This means that, unless I want to lose my learners to email, and online bill paying, I need to engage participants every 4 minutes. Interaction comes in various forms. Learners might read, write in a workbook, type on the whiteboard, reflect, listen to different voices, poll or chat.
The more inexperienced the webinar audience is with the platform and the content, the more focused they are on trying to stay with the facilitator. Their distractions are typically user error and time spent trying to figure out where they are and what they are supposed to be doing. The more advanced the user is with either the subject matter or the webinar tools, the quicker they get distracted and the more likely they are to leave their computer and run errands at the grocery store or do laundry!
These true stories happen because facilitators are designing synchronous training as though it were a conference call. If participants know they are not going to be "watched" or expected to do more than listen, then they can get away with being distracted. As a solution, have designers plan for interaction from the very moment the virtual classroom opens and every 4 minutes thereafter.
If you haven't hosted a webinar that is interactive, know that you can be effective just by applying a few of the tips, tricks and activities found in the chapters of my book Webinars With WOW Factor. The Trainer Tip section of this e-Zine has one activity from the book that could be used successfully on a webinar to keep participants engaged.
