Engagement Activities

Slide-Based Presentations

Slide-based presentations are as popular in all online webinars as they are in face-to-face sessions. You can use them to give a formal presentation, as an accompaniment to a lecture, or as a show and tell component. Consider shaking up your presentation by inserting different engagement activities within the slide based presentation so as to break up monotony.

Screen Sharing

Screen shares allow you to display whatever you have visible on your desktop to your live audience. You can use screen shares for show and tell, for live demonstrations of software, or for web quests. Additionally, some online presentation software will allow participants to share their desktop with the group and even give screen control to the presenter, which can be helpful for giving feedback or offering corrections.

Whiteboards

Whiteboards place an invisible editable screen on top of whatever content that you would like to display, to include a blank screen. Consider using whiteboards for explanations, demonstrations, and corrections of any visual content that you’d like. In the TED Talk below, Salman Khan begins by showing excerpts from his many Khan Academy lessons, all of which are stunning examples of the whiteboard in action.

Slideshows and Graphics

Offering visual content in the form of a slideshow of images or interactive graphics can help participants to better understand the material being presented. Consider using graphics to aid presentations, demonstrations, and simulations. Great places to find stunning images would be Flickr Creative Commons and National Geographic Photography (where this image can be found in their Life in Color: Red collection).

Video and Multimedia

Video segments, when used effectively, have the ability to awaken new knowledge and increase learner motivation amongst participants. You can utilize video within a presentation or demonstration as a means of bringing in a new voice or perspective to your online session. The example below of animated sheet music for John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” is an example of the types of rich media that have been created as a fresh take on traditional topics.

Icebreakers

A staple of face-to-face meetings, icebreakers are a great way to get information from your audience before the webinar starts. They also allow participants to learn a little more about their fellow learners, and build connections with other participants that may last beyond the scope of the time of the webinar.

Question and Answer

Adding some sort of Q and A as an engagement activity is probably one of the easiest ways to garner feedback from your audience. You can ask for responses from individual participants or from the entire group, and you can have them answer over the microphone or written in a chat box. A quick question posed to the group can help you to assess understanding and learner attitudes.

Group Discussions

Large group discussions allow for rich dialogue in the form of multiple questions and answers. You can use large group discussions to present case studies, hypothetical scenarios, or allow participants to give reviews and critiques on work presented in the session.

Interviews

Conducting an interview as an engagement activity within a webinar allows you to break free of the traditional one-to-many presentation format by featuring a dynamic duo on the stage. Allow participants to interact with the interview subject and the material by encouraging them to submit questions in the chat box, over the mic, or beforehand by email.

Drop Polls

A drop poll is a variation on the question and answer activity in that it allows you to pose a question on-the-fly that users can respond to quickly with one or two word answers. Have users submit their answers in the chat box so that all can see the patterns and trends of responses as they float in.

Multiple Choice Polls

Consider a multiple choice poll if you would like to limit the available responses for participants. Multiple choice polls allow a quick and easy point of engagement that can easily be prepared beforehand and launched when the time is right. Many online presentation systems that offer polling features will also tabulate data for you into graphical organizers and charts so that you can display the results of the poll to participants at the click of a mouse.

Breakout Rooms

Many online presentation tools offer the ability to create breakout rooms on the fly, allowing you to divide all of your participants into smaller clusters for localized group work. Breakout rooms are excellent when used for brainstorming, case studies, problem-solving, and concept mapping.

Discussion Questions

Allowing small clusters of participants to step away from the larger group to discuss a question is a good tactic for engaging learners who have a tendency to lurk rather than speak up when many people are present.  Give each group a question and have them report back on their findings to the larger group.  This is an excellent approach for brainstorming, and can be handled easily with breakout rooms.

Team Practice

Rather than giving the smaller groups a question, in this activity you’ll give them a short assignment to complete.  Make use of breakout rooms to give individuals access to whiteboards for collaborative work on a smaller scale.

Scavenger Hunts

Sometimes stepping away from the group can help to create a spark of creativity.  Have learners complete a web quest as a team and give them a list of items to find online that they can divide and conquer.  Then, when participants have completed their share, they can reconvene and assess. This is excellent for problem solving assignments.

Multiple Choice Quiz

Offering a few questions that can be tabulated in your system will give learners feedback on how they are doing, and let you know what information that you might need to go over again.

Polls

Similar in nature to the quiz option above, polls are less formal and the data can be shared with the entire group.

Status Check

If you want to get a simple yes/no answer on whether your participants understand or can do something, simply take a moment to perform a status check.  This can be helpful if you want feedback on understanding of hands-on or procedural knowledge, but relies on people being willing to speak up if they don’t understand.  You can have participants offer feedback in the chat box or, if your system has them, with the status icons available for participants to click on (ie. Agree, Disagree, Raise Hand)

Techniques for Increasing Engagement

Aside from utilizing a combination of the activities listed above, consider working in some or all of these techniques to keep your audience focused on your presentation.

Tell a Story

Bringing a human touch to your presentation with anecdotes and true stories makes your content seem more applicable.  People respond more to real-life scenarios than rote lists of data and statistics.

Feature Multiple Speakers

Changing the primary speaker within the presentation can help to enliven your session.  Consider bringing in a guest speaker, conducting an interview, hosting a panel for question and answer, or including time for a collaborative discussion.  If you choose to hold an interview, you can further engage participants before the session by asking them to submit questions beforehand.  That way, they are thinking about the material before you even begin the lesson.

Change Up Engagement Activities

Setting an agenda that keeps people interacting with the material in different ways is key to an effective webinar.  Keep your engagement activities brief and consider stacking activities on top of each other to encourage new perspectives on the content.

Randomization and Direct Questioning

Rather than informally asking for answers of anyone in the group, keep participants on their toes by asking targeted questions of participants chosen at random.  Have them share the extent of their knowledge with demonstrations, such as giving them control of the screen or a pointer to use in answering the question.  Breaking up patterns with randomization helps to increase attention.

Group Work

As stated earlier, in a collection of learners, you’ll find that several will default to lurking and watching rather than actively participating, all for a variety of reasons.  Encourage active learning by breaking the larger group into smaller clusters.  Doing so encourages participants to feel responsible for not only their learning, but the learning of their fellow group members.

Offer Incentives

In her article, “What Stinks About Webinars,” Colleen Cunningham states of a particularly engaging session that she attended that participation was ensured by the presenter “providing a prize at the end for a lucky individual pulled from a list of those who were first to volunteer answers and questions.” ^[1]  Consider rewarding good participation as a means of encouraging the rest to do the same.

Encourage Forward Progress

Dr. Susan Weinschenk writes on the phenomena of the “flow state” – a period of productivity with constant stimuli and feedback that allows individuals to work at a heightened pace. ^[2]  If you hit an activity or concept that has participants creativity sparking, linger a little longer on that content if need be.  Agenda or no, if your learners are engaged, don’t be afraid to tweak your plan slightly to accommodate their enthusiasm.

Show the Big Picture

Conclude all of your activities by putting the new knowledge into context in terms of how it relates to prior knowledge and the collective knowledge on the topic.  Make the information applicable and relatable with a strong summary or takeaway.