A Critique of My First Webinar (Attended)

Project Based Learning for Every Classroom
2/4/16, 5PM – 6PM EST
http://home.edweb.net/webinar/project-based-learning-for-every-classroom/
Facilitated by Kimberleigh Doyle, Nureva (corporate sponsor)
Presented by Rachel Langenhorst, K-12 Technology Integrationist and Instructional Coach

Project Based Learning is a specific approach to using projects in the classroom. This webinar was an introduction to PBL, with details about the specific approach of PBL to classroom projects, and summaries of and links to various resources and tools.

There were over 450 participants(!), so there was no interactive learning. Sadly, the webinar was pretty much a narration of a bunch of slides. It occurred to me that a webinar was the wrong tool for this kind of presentation - pretty much any kind of asynchronous medium would have been better.

The presenter was very professional. Her voice was pleasant and practiced, but not particularly engaging. She was, in essence, simply narrating a collection of uninspiring slides. The room she was in was a pretty boring modern office, but at least it wasn’t distracting. The slides were easy to read, and the overall design was simple and reasonably consistent. The graphics used were arranged haphazardly and were not particularly engaging, but they were at least relevant.

The facilitator, on the other hand, was clearly not practiced, or even very organized. She was not paying attention to her voice quality or projection. Sunlight was coming in through the windows behind her which caused the camera to lower the exposure, making her harder to see. The miscellaneous clutter on the wall behind her was a bit distracting.

It was useful that the slides had live links in them – I could have clicked on them and opened them up if I wanted to. Because the webinar was recorded and is available to me to review, I was OK with the fact that there were no handouts.

I have to say that the experience was rather dreadful and a bit demoralizing. I would use this experience as an example of what NOT to do with a webinar. I felt exactly the way I have felt during some professional development sessions at my school workplace – information that I could have read and understood in about 10 minutes or watched in a 20 minute video being stretched out into a 2-hour presentation with relatively meaningless interaction.

I was thankful that the presenter did not narrate the slides verbatim at least. But otherwise, I am perfectly capable of viewing and reading a slide presentation on my own. I also thought it was ironic that the presenter referred to Project Based Learning many times as an alternative to lecture/explanation/presentation-based education, when what she was doing was essentially lecturing to me for an hour.

I did come to understand that with over 450 participants this webinar was going to have only minor interaction. Pretty much all the interaction was going on in the chat window. It seemed that the instant the webinar began there also began non-stop chatting among the participants. It was weird – everybody chatted as if they all knew each other and were maybe just carrying on a conversation that had been going on all day. It was incredibly distracting. I couldn’t understand how any of the chatting participants were able to pay attention to the presenter or to the slides. I understand the concept of a back channel, but this was ridiculous. And comments arrived right on cue, too – “Oh, that’s a great resource, I use it all the time!” And when the webinar ended, there were dozens and dozens of “Thank-you! It was so informative!” when in fact it hadn’t really been that informative. I actually began to suspect that most of the comments (and maybe the participants) were planted by the webinar sponsor.

This webinar made me think a lot about synchronous versus asynchronous learning/teaching. In particular, it seems to me that if something can be presented asynchronously, then it probably should be. The synchronous presentation should be saved for a smaller audience, allowing for real interaction and active learning.

I’ll finish with a final note about the webinar presentation tool. It was called AnyMeeting, and I guess it used to be called InstantPresenter. The program did not have a particularly attractive interface, but I was able to figure out the various tools (and the facilitator provided some instructions too, which I appreciated). There was one full window divided into 4 frames, which could all be resized. The video window and the slide window, when resized, also changed the size of the contents, which was great. Frames with text (like the chat frame) did NOT increase the size of the text. Because I was using a tablet, the text font-size was about 6 or 8 pt, way too small for me to read easily. Using the browser to increase the size of the window elements only caused AnyMeeting to resize the text back down, which was very annoying.