 Today we are going to discuss how to engage learners at a distance through interactive webinars. First, it's always best practice to provide a framework to let your learners know what to expect and to help them focus on your core message. You can do this by providing an agenda, goals, or outcomes for your session. Once the goals are introduced, it's good practice to get a sense of who's in the room. This is also an opportunity to engage your learners as active participants in the learning process. One way to do this is to ask a question that's based on the learner's personal experiences. Participants tend to become more invested as they share their diverse perspectives and viewpoints. Getting your learners to share their personal experiences also stimulates thinking. It's also good practice to get your respondents interacting. There are many ways to do this in a webinar. They can come up with video and raise their hands, post comments in the chat, raise their hands using the built-in participant controls, unmute and audibly answer the question, or you could even build your question into the session through the polling function in Zoom. A nice feature of the polling function is that you can make the results of the poll visible to your audience, catching your learner's attention with both visual and auditory stimuli. It's also important to use silence effectively when engaging an audience. When you pose a question, your learners need time to consider the question or to collect their thoughts. Then they may wish to utilize the chat function to respond and typing takes time. So make sure to accommodate this by waiting. Count to ten if it helps you with pacing. I like to wait until at least half of my participants have contributed before speaking again. If you go to the Zoom website, there are several resources available that walk you through how to use the interface. This slide depicts a snapshot of what you can expect to see from the participant perspective. Once you've scheduled or started a Zoom session, your learners can connect by clicking on a link that you've shared via email, posted to a learning management system, or shared in a calendar invitation. The first time someone connects to a Zoom session, the presenter can help learners get comfortable in the environment by reminding them how to use the major participant controls, like the chat function and raising hands. To keep your learners engaged, it's important to ask questions often and break the session into digestible chunks. Consider a YouTube video, TV show, or movie that holds your interest. Depending on the video, maybe you can watch for four minutes or so with total focus. Or maybe ten minutes is your cap before you start to zone out. Your learners face this attention challenge as well. I like to break up my webinars every ten to fifteen minutes with opportunities for questions, a discussion, breakout sessions, or an activity to get my learners actively thinking and doing. There are a number of tools that are interactive that can help support your teaching. Poll Everywhere and SoccerTube are two of my favorites. At this point in the webinar, I might invite learners to submit the first words that come to their mind when they think about a bad webinar. What you see on the screen is a snapshot of Poll Everywhere's word cloud function, where participants have submitted their thoughts. Words that were submitted multiple times show up larger than words that were submitted with less frequency. As you see, good webinars can go bad when there's poor pacing, bad information design, technical challenges, and a lack of audience engagement. It's also important to acknowledge that your learners have something to add to the conversation. Asking learners to share their experiences and perceptions allows you to communicate that you acknowledge and value your learners as individuals. Asking questions and encouraging discussion among your learners early in the session also provides an opportunity to identify where your learners may have gaps in their understanding. And it helps to build community by facilitating student-to-student interaction as well as student-to-instructor interaction. I like to do this by posing a question verbally or on a slide, then setting up breakout rooms for my learners to discuss their ideas in small groups. I set a timer for three to five minutes and asked students to discuss the prompt together in groups of about two to four, and then post a few ideas to share with the group to an interactive whiteboard. When I close breakout rooms and all learners return to the main session, they all continue the discussion. We know that different learners have different learning preferences, and so what engages one learner might not work for another. Learners might try a number of different strategies to keep their learners' interest. One strategy is to tell a story or anecdote that appeals to your audience's interest. Another strategy is to use technology to your advantage by meeting learners where they are. Polling apps and activities on smartphones can be leveraged depending on what's most appropriate for your learning objectives, your content, and your learners' needs. As learners interact in breakout groups, I may stay in the main session and follow the progress on a live interactive collaboration board like Padlet. I might share the link to the interactive board prior to the web session through the Learning Management System or LMS, through email or on a slide or in the chat during the live webinar session. Once all breakout rooms have closed, I like to change what I'm sharing on my screen and begin sharing the live interactive board in real time. Because learners can see and interact with the content, we are now facilitating the learner-to-content interaction. This is also a good opportunity to pause for questions, especially if you see something posted on the interactive board or if you heard something in the discussion that caught your attention or picked your curiosity. Keep in mind that when it comes to calling for questions, you may have someone in the session who is attending for the sake of asking one big burning question. If you don't offer the opportunity for that learner and other learners to ask such questions, you may be unintentionally turning off your audience. Don't just save Q&A for the end. That's not very engaging. Now let's shift to the webinar presentation itself. Take a moment and make some observations about this slide. Put yourself in the learner's place. What do you see? Can you read everything that is intended to be read? Is this image helping you to learn something? How could this slide be improved for better clarity and learning? You might have said that there's too much on this slide that it's too busy and too colorful. Your eyes are drawn to too many spots. So it becomes difficult to focus. When it comes to information design, there's a wealth of literature out there that can teach you how to make engaging and accessible presentations. Best practices include presenting information starting from more general concepts to more specific ones and utilizing both visual and verbal cues with simple designs that avoid cognitive overload with overly complex images that divert the learner's attention. How about this slide? Again, put yourself in the learner's place. What do you see? Can you read everything? Everything that's intended to be read? Is this image helping you learn something? How could this slide be improved for better clarity and learning? You probably notice that the author of this slide has used contrasting text colors to draw the learner's attention, but the text is a little bit tricky to read over the busy background. If your goal is to present new information, then both the images and the text need to be accessible to the audience. If you were to modify this slide to increase visibility, then we might consider removing the text altogether, just allowing the full screen image to speak for itself. We might say the comments you see in yellow instead of posting them on the slide, or we might put the text next to the image so that both the text and the image can be viewed without obstruction or loss of meaning. Presentations in themselves can be used as a tool for interaction. Take this slide, for example. While the image is filled with colors, words, and symbols, it might not make a great slide to present an audience with new information using laptops or projectors. However, this image can still be used as an effective teaching tool in a different way. Jason Lineberger, one of our instructors, uses this image in a Google Slides presentation that he shares with his students in 21st-century media studies. He provides the thought bubbles and call-out boxes for students on the slide to copy, paste, and use as they take a moment to observe what they notice in the image. Students take time to digest the image in smaller parts as they independently focus on the pieces that draw their attention. He uses this as a tool to facilitate discussion and engage his learners. The image itself isn't the most important piece of the presentation, but rather the dialogue and learning that it stimulates is what matters. How about this slide? Is the image clear? Do you know what you are looking at? As the learner, you should be able to clearly make out what's in the image and read the text without issue. Webinars can be challenging for learners who are unfamiliar with the expectations and functions of virtual meeting and webinar tools. It's important to set standards and expectations up front in order to promote a positive learning environment. Though you can easily set up a web conference with just a click of a few buttons, leading or facilitating exceptional webinars is a finely tuned skill. Like any skill, it takes time and practice to master. Technical issues are among the most common pain points when it comes to engaging learners at a distance. Unfortunately, we can't always anticipate when issues are going to arise with technology. However, when challenges do present themselves, the best thing you can do is to be patient and have a backup plan. For example, if a learner's microphone is not functional, you might ask them to put questions or comments into the chat. Your learners will be connecting for the webinar from Macs, PCs, tablets, smartphones, and teleconferencing suites. It's a lot to expect any teacher to be able to troubleshoot the range of possible issues that may come up as learners navigate these environments. I like to encourage my learners to test out the functions and tools in Zoom prior to joining the scheduled webinar session so that they can become familiar with the technology before the session goes live. I also direct learners to tutorials that can help them solve technical challenges without my assistance. When this fails, I host one-on-one sessions to help learners navigate meeting controls, and I make verbal suggestions during the live session or provide technical assistance through the chat function when audio is challenging. I also like to solicit suggestions from other webinar participants so that the learners can help solve one another's challenges. Soliciting input from the learners also helps to encourage learner-to-learner dialogue, and it communicates a sense of value for the learners' experience and contributions in the shared learning space. Managing distractions in the learning environment is another common issue we come across in teaching over videoconferencing. Learners join the live session from home and may be contending with noise from siblings or family events or pets or the weather or conflicts with other scheduled events. This is all on top of the web conferencing technology itself, which can be a distraction for users who are experiencing a live session for the first time. I encourage learners to find a quiet place in the home, library, at a friend's house, in a conference room, or even in a parked car if that will allow the headspace they need in order to pay attention to the live session. Keeping the learners' attention is perhaps the most common concern. It's difficult for anyone to sit through an hour-long web session that doesn't draw them in. I encourage you to brainstorm with your peers about how you can leverage the technology, classroom management strategies, and pedagogy to keep your audience's attention. In some cases, a tool like Zoom doesn't just replace traditional classroom interaction, but can significantly improve it. For example, you might consider taking virtual field trips using the web conferencing platform with learners in multiple locations. One of my favorite features is the whiteboard in Zoom, which can be shared with the entire group of participants or in breakout groups for live collaboration, like when students work on a math problem on a dry erase board in a live classroom. Encouraging learners to share their screens when sharing ideas or making presentations or inviting guest speakers or panelists may also help keep your audience's attention. As far as the technology itself is concerned, make sure to set the tone for your interactions upfront. For example, you might encourage learners to use the chat often to encourage scholarly discourse or have learners turn their webcam on for the duration of the session. You might expect participants to have their microphones open during the whole session, or you might only want microphones live during specific points of the session. Whatever you expect of your learner, make that clear from the beginning and don't assume everyone is on the same page. And don't hesitate to remind learners of the expectations for interactions as needed. Towards the end of the webinar, it's a good practice to gauge your audience and identify learning gains and struggles. I call this my wrapper. Wrappers can help you to leave a lasting impression on your audience. Your wrapper can be something silly like the meme you see here, something more contemplative, like posing a question for reflection or capturing responses for a formative assessment. I like to use virtual tools like dot storming, Kahoot, or Padlet to collect responses so that I can reflect on them later and make a plan for improvement. If you're using a virtual tool, make sure to check the links to ensure the resources are functional and visible to your participants, especially if you are reusing existing resources. Here are some of the key takeaways from this video. Thanks for watching.