Lesson 1: Overview of Effective Webinar Training

1. Introduction

Have you ever had trouble paying attention during a webinar?

Most likely, you answered yes to this question. The mental demand of paying attention is substantial, and it can quickly degrade if nothing is done to maintain it. One study found that student attention can lapse as soon as the first minute of a lecture!

When your attention lapses, you may begin multi-tasking while paying partial attention or pay no attention at all. In either case, you are unlikely to learn much since attention is required for learning.

Watch the following video describing how to pay attention:
(Click the arrow to start the video.)

Why do you think you were asked to watch this video?

1. It should motivate you to learn strategies to keep your viewers attentive.
2. It illustrates how the burden of paying attention is on the viewer if the presenter fails to maintain it.
3. It is an example of what you hope your viewers will not need to do during your webinar.

While you can’t offer snacks during a webinar, if you use the strategies you learn in this course, your students won’t need them to combat boredom!

2. Overview

In this lesson, you will learn about:

• The importance of maintaining the attention of your webinar participants.
• The requirements for effective webinar training.
• Two teaching approaches and how they affect learning outcomes.
• Three components of the approach you will be taught in this course for developing effective webinars.

3. Teaching Approaches

What happens during many training webinars is illustrated above. The presenter talks, and participants listen. Even if useful information is presented, participants may feel like they are being bombarded and tune out. Instead of learning from it, the information goes right to the trash. 

Teaching Approaches and Learning

A teaching approach focusing on what the teacher does and the transmission of information is called teacher-centered. In contrast, a teaching approach focusing on engaging students with what is being taught is student-centered.

Studies show that a teacher-centered approach results in students taking a surface approach to learning, whereas a student-centered approach leads to a deep approach to learning. These differences are significant because deep approaches to learning lead to better learning outcomes.

Read the section 'How do people learn?' on page 147 of the paper Applying learning theories and instructional design models for effective instruction.

Student-Centered Webinars

Webinars often use a lecture-style format where the presenter transmits information and participants passively receive it. This teacher-centered approach puts the webinar's effectiveness in question. This doesn't mean that a lecture-style format is bad for webinars. What it does mean is that you should incorporate student-centered strategies in your webinar. This is backed up by evidence showing that students have fewer attention lapses during lectures around times when student-centered teaching approaches are used, and they maintain this attention for a time following their use.

In the video "How to Pay Attention to a Boring Presentation," the speaker effectively used strategies to maintain viewer attention. For example, he informs viewers up front what he will present, establishes why the information is relevant to them, uses examples, and offers approaches for implementing each tip. He also stays on topic and keeps it short. While the video does not include direct communication with viewers, it is still an example of student-focused teaching. It uses strategies that keep viewers engaged with the content rather than being passive recipients of the information. You will learn more about how to do this in the following lessons.

4. Requirements for Effective Webinar Training

Which of the following are required for a training webinar to be effective?

(You may select more than one option)

1. Participants give high ratings in the post-webinar evaluation form.
2. Most participants stay connected until the end of the webinar.
3. Participants gained the intended skills and/or knowledge.
4. The instructor covered all of the intended material.
5. The webinar had a high number of registrants.

5. Approach for Effective Webinar Training Development

By now, you should recognize the importance of using a student-centered teaching approach for your webinar training. But how are you going to do it?

In this course, you will learn an approach that utilizes techniques derived from the following three areas:

1. Webinar best practices
2. Interactive webinar tools
3. Instructional design principles

These are described briefly in the following sections.  You will learn more about them later in the course.

5.1. Webinar Best Practices

Webinars are widely used in industry and education, and there are many established best practices for conducting them. These best practices address not only what to do during a webinar but also before and after a webinar.

Examples of Webinar Best Practices

Participant engagement is a common characteristic of most webinar best practices. It is easy to see how some best practices engage participants, such as using chat and polling for interaction. However, some are less obvious. For example, how you structure your PowerPoint presentation can work for or against engagement. Although this course is not a webinar, it uses many strategies for presenting content to engage participants.  For example, the information above was presented in a table format to make it more engaging than a paragraph format would have been.

5.2. Effective Use of Interactive Webinar Tools

When there is no interaction between the presenter and the webinar audience, there is no sense of connection. Participants might as well be watching a recording. A sense of connection or ‘social presence’ is important for maintaining the attention of your audience.

Interactive webinar tools such as voice audio, chat, application sharing, and polling enable interaction similar to a face-to-face setting. These can be used to enable a student-centered teaching approach by engaging participants in the instruction. They also serve to cultivate a sense of social presence.

Interaction is also important for the speaker. Without it, they can feel isolated when talking to a computer screen rather than an audience. This lack of feedback from the audience may negatively affect how well the information is presented.

Additional benefits of using interactive tools include:

Later, you will learn how to use good teaching practices to select which interactive tools to use. While these tools may be beneficial to learning, they can be detrimental if not appropriately applied.

5.3. Instructional Design Principles

Instructional design is a systematic process used to develop effective instruction. Instructional design principles are grounded by learning theory and offer varying levels of guidance to help choose appropriate strategies to facilitate learning. Using instructional design principles to make decisions when developing your webinar training will increase your instruction's likelihood of success.

There are MANY instructional design models. Some are aimed at specific types of learning tasks, while others are more generic. While there are many different design models, they all typically include the following activities: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. In this course, you will learn about two well-known models - Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction and Dick & Carey's Systems Approach Model. You will learn how to use elements of these models to determine instructional goals and instructional strategies you can use to engage your webinar participants and facilitate learning.

Note that instructional design is not a rigid process where each step must be followed in order. Rather it is adaptable to both the instructor's and learner's needs. Instructional designers typically do not follow one method but pick and choose among methods based on the unique circumstances of the individual design task.

The method described in this course is a simplified approach intended for use by technical subject matter experts who design webinar training. It is not expected that you will become an expert instructional designer. However, you should learn new skills to improve your ability to teach others.

6. Summary

Although webinar participants should take some responsibility for paying attention, it is ultimately the presenter’s role to maintain their attention.

A teacher-focused teaching approach:

• Focuses on the transmission of information to students who passively receive it.
• Leads to students taking a surface approach to learning. 

A student-focused teaching approach:

• Focuses on engaging students with what is being taught.
• Leads to students taking a deep approach to learning.

A deep approach to learning results in better learning outcomes. The goal of instructional delivery is to facilitate understanding (deep learning) over rote memorization (surface learning). Deep learning leads to the information being transferred into long-term memory where it is permanently stored (i.e., it is learned).

Using webinar best practices, interactive webinar tools, and instructional design principles can enable a student-centered teaching approach for webinars.

• A common characteristic of webinar best practices is their focus on engagement.
• Interactive webinar tools can be used to cultivate a sense of social presence.
• Instructional design principles provide guidance to help choose appropriate strategies to facilitate learning.

7. Self-Test

Check your understanding of the material presented in this lesson.

Take the Lesson 1 Self-Test