This ten-minute video (10’17”) is a series of screen captures from live synchronous webinars taught using Adobe Connect (2015). It is annotated to give you some sense of how to manage interactivity, manage your tone, reflect on the importance of personal presence and to make use of the visual nature of the webinar interface. These examples are taken from a postgraduate teaching qualification but the ‘content’ is irrelevant. While it is not intended to be a blow-by-blow explanation of how to construct your webinars, once you have access to a webinar room, Connect, Collaborate or other solution, this might give you some ideas as to how you could adapt your teaching practice for this form of synchronous distance teaching. #highered #teaching #webinars
These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’m looking at some interesting uses of PowerPoint/Presenter as stand alone resources which might be seen as multi-modal workbooks, animated, engaging objects which stand-alone for the student.
The other concern about ‘transferring practice to alternative contexts’ has arisen in connection with staff asking about the ‘online delivery of lectures’. It looks like institutionally there will be some support for Adobe Connect but whether staff are in a position to use it effectively will depend on a range of external factors. I’m preparing for a couple of PD events on the PowerPoint-> Presenter-> Connect equation and again, it raises a number of interesting issues.
Why! The educational developer’s favourite question. Why do you want to ‘deliver the lecture’ online? Why is it a lecture? Why is the student going to benefit from this mode of delivery? I’m looking at some interesting uses of PowerPoint/Presenter as stand-alone resources which might be seen as multi-modal workbooks, animated and engaging objects that stand-alone for the student. These might then indeed have some kind of facilitated discourse around them, and that may well happen inside Connect so the presentation (or an alternative version of it) might be shared and annotated, referenced and so on. I am struggling with the concept that the online synchronous ‘presentation’ is an effective use of the student, or lecturer, time. Why (there’s that word again!) would one take the time to present? Maybe it relates in part to the fact that in our face-to-face practice we can ‘half-prepare’ the representation because we often ‘busk’ around the edges. If we want to create a genuinely usefully internally scaffolded and referenced presentation… well that takes real work.
Do most academic staff consider these issues of internal structure to their content? Or are they so used to dealing with a linear information exchange model that they just don’t think about it? Who can blame them? How do we change that? How do we move from the ‘Sage on the Stage’ approach to the ‘content author/facilitator’ model on an institutional basis?
