Informing Using Webinars

Webinars
Hosting webinars, and recording for later viewing, is another way that we can inform and support families and professionals. But it is important to understand that a webinar is not as simple as taking your current face-to-face presentation and showing it via the internet. All learning requires that the learner take their current knowledge, examine the new information and somehow combine the two. While webinars mean that learners can do this from the comfort of their living rooms, it also means that they have many more distractions--dogs, kids, Facebook, email. You get the picture. But have no fear, there are ways to grab their attention, keep it and inform them! 

Developing Instruction
Think about what your audience wants to learn. How will you help them combine this new knowledge with what they already know? To be useful, your instruction must meet their needs. Do not to overload them--really think through if you need that animation or audio clip.  Balance using the available technology with its usefulness. It is important to base your instruction on how people learn. Thankfully there is plenty of evidenced-based practice in this area. If you have both words and pictures on a page, place your words near the pictures. A separation of words and pictures tells the brain that it is looking at two different ideas. You are already asking the brain to work hard, don't mistakenly ask it to overwork.

Engaging the Learners
One of the advantages of a webinar, or synchronous learning environment, is the interactivity.  You can post a poll, ask people to raise their hands, answer questions using the microphones or in the chat box. If you want your audience to interact, you should begin your session asking folks to answer a question. Where is everyone?  Are they at home? the office? When planning out your presentation think about natural points where you can check in with your learners. This helps them stay engaged. With a webinar you need to be more deliberate than in an face-to-face (F2F) training. In a F2F training you know if the room is with you, against you or asleep! Online, you've got limited ability to see what others are up to--some webinars allow you to "peek" at your learner's desktop--but it seems too "Big Brother" for me! Rather than stalk your learners, make sure you are more engaging than Farmville! One way to prepare participants that you are expecting this to be a two-way interaction is to open the room early, begin to engage with participants using the available technology. I often open up the webinar room a half-hour before the session, which means that my producer (the person who handles all of the technical aspects of the training) and I are "in" the room about an hour before the session.  We have the PowerPoint loaded, we've checked the audio, the call-in line, etc. And we hope, fingers crossed, that we don't have any glitches.