2014 07-30--online facilitation1--leading-engaging_meetings_and_webinars[v2]
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This first of four webinars on "Mastering Online Facilitation," originally delivered and delivered for SEFLIN, provides an overview of how to design and facilitate webinars and online meetings. It is designed to model the practices discussed with the learners; leaves plenty of time for interactions with and among the learners; and concludes with resources and suggested activities to help participants apply what they are learning.
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2014 07-30--online facilitation1--leading-engaging_meetings_and_webinars[v2]
- 1. Facilitated by Paul Signorelli Writer/Trainer/Consultant Paul Signorelli & Associates paul@paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli July 30, 2014 Mastering Online Facilitation: Leading Engaging Meetings and Webinars
- 2. Discussion #1: Engagement vs. Disengagement Please briefly describe one memorable onsite oronline meeting orclass you have attended, and describe what made it memorable.
- 3. Discussion #1: Engagement vs. Disengagement Please briefly describe one terrible onsite oronline meeting orclass you have attended, and describe what made you wish you had stayed home and read a book.
- 5. Building Upon What We Know
- 6. Blended: The Future That Is With Us Now
- 7. Myth-busting: Is Face-to-Face BetterThan Online? http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf
- 8. Myth-busting: Is Face-to-Face BetterThan Online? “…most chief academic officers ratethelearningoutcomes for onlineeducation‘as goodas or betterthan’ thoseforface-to-face instruction.” --I. ElaineAllenandJeff Seaman, 2013 http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf
- 9. Myth-busting: Is Face-to-Face BetterThan Online? http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2009/01/virtual_meetings_will_erase_face_to_face.ht ml
- 11. Personal Experience: Afterthe Online Meetings
- 12. Personal Experience: Meetings as Learning Opportunities
- 13. Personal Experience: Webinars That Engage
- 14. Discussion #2: What Holds (Y)ourInterest? Please name at least one thing you have noticed in this session that you could immediately use in yourown online meetings orwebinars.
- 15. Becoming Comfortable Online: Essential Elements
- 16. Becoming Comfortable Online: Synchronous Trainer’s Survival Guide
- 18. Becoming Comfortable Online: First Webinar/NineLessons http://michelemartin.typepad
- 19. Basic Tips/Reminders: Practice, Experiment, & Embrace Failure
- 20. Basic Tips/Reminders: Practice, Experiment, & Embrace Failure
- 21. Basic Tips/Reminders: Practice, Experiment, & EmbraceFailure
- 22. Discussion #3: Fear What (if any) fears do you want to overcome as a result of your participation in these webinars?
- 23. The Audience You Cannot See: Picturing YourAudience
- 24. The Audience You Cannot See: Addressing and Responding
- 25. Discussion #3: Applying What We’ve Learned What is one thing you will do in the next weekto improve youronline presentation skills?
- 26. In Summary
- 27. In Summary
- 28. In Summary
- 29. In Summary
- 30. Resources (1) “Hanging Out With the Tech Crowd,” by Paul Signorelli Am e rican Librarie s blog, January 25, 2014 http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blog/hanging-out-tech-crow Chang ing Co urse : Te n Ye ars o f Tracking O nline Educatio n in the Unite d State s, by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC, 2013 http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf
- 32. Resources (3) Formore on web conferencing and online presentation skills: http://paulsignorelli.com/PDFs/Bibliography--Webconferencing_Resources.pdf
- 35. ForMore Information Paul Signorelli & Associates 1032 Irving St., #514 San Francisco, CA 94122 415.681.5224 paul@paulsignorelli.com http://paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com
- 36. Credits & Acknowledgments (Images taken from flickr.com unless otherwise noted): Herding Cats: Screenshot from EDS Company’s video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=m_MaJDK3VNE Teacher and Students in Classroom: From www.audio-luci-store.it’s photostreamat http://tinyurl.com/mqtlnyg Empty Steas: From Eric James Sarmiento’s photostream at http://tinyurl.com/mprkguu Communication: From Paul Shanks’s photostreamat http://tinyurl.com/mqk899c Cisco Telepresence: Photo from DolanH’s photostream at https://www.flickr.com/photos/reneeanddolan/654865749 ALA LITA (Library Information and Technology Association) Members With Google Glass: Photo by Paul Signorelli, at ALA Midwinter Meeting (Philadelphia), January 2014 Practice: From WoodleyWonderworks’s photostreamat http://tinyurl.com/oath2rt Experiment: From JDHancock’s photostream at http://tinyurl.com/qegyre8 Edsel: From Ron Cogswell’s photostreamat http://tinyurl.com/q896k7u Invisible Man: From Robert Huffstutter’s photostreamat http://tinyurl.com/o6yh2wo http://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/6136653327/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Question Marks: From Valerie Everett’s photostreamat http://www.flickr.com/photos/valeriebb/3006348550/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to the first of four sessions on “mastering online facilitation” sponsored by the Southeast Florida Library Information Network. If we’re successful together, we’ll all leave these webinars with the sense that working with colleagues online is far less like herding cats—an image familiar to the millions of us who have viewed the EDS Company’s video about cowboys herding cats across the prairie—and far more an exciting extension of our ability to work with colleagues online in familiar as well as unfamiliar ways. These sessions are meant to be like the topic they cover: highly interactive examples of how we can conduct online meetings and webinars Please don’t hesitate to post questions in the chat window at any time during the presentation. We’ll work together to explore the issues that come up so we can all effectively learn from each other.
- Let’s set a context based on our own experiences… If you add your own comments into the chat window and jot down notes from your colleagues’ comments, you’ll already be creating a presentation toolkit you can immediately start using after our session concludes today.
- A second question…
- One of the many themes we’ll keep focusing on is that online presentation isn’t centered around technology. The focus is on people and communication. Let’s be explicit: The technology that allows us to engage in online communication shouldn’t drive the process; the technology should be the tool that helps facilitate communication and collaboration.
- What we are seeing here is state-of-the-art telepresence technology developed by Cisco. It’s dazzling; it’s beyond the budgets most of us have. It’s something that parallels what we’re also seeing in the “smart classrooms” that some of our corporate colleagues are using so that onsite learners can connect and interact with colleagues in other venues regardless of distance. And it’s something that we can replicate at simple but effective levels with tools as simple to use at Google Hangouts and Skype, or those that require service fees--such as Adobe Connect, WebEx, or Blackboard Collaborate. But when you get right down to it, the introduction of this level of technology really doesn’t erase the fact that if we know how to run meetings effectively, the fact that some of the participants are in the room physically and others are in the room virtually doesn’t mean we’re learning from scratch how to talk with each other and run effective meetings. It’s helpful, to remember that much of what serves us well onsite will also serve us well online as we become familiar with the tools that are coming our way. What we’ll explore together is how to build upon what we know so that we can actually carry presentation skills in both directions: from onsite to online, and from online to onsite. I believe that working seamlessly in both makes us far better communicators and facilitators than we would be if we worked exclusively in one arena rather than both—and that the chances to blend our onsite and online experiences creates possibilities we would not otherwise have.
- Let’s look at one example of what I consider to be a current and somewhat unusual state-of-the-art blended meeting that some of us could easily replicate—and all of us can learn something just by being aware of what we’re seeing. The long story made short: Several members of the American Library Association Library Information and Technology Association were meeting informally in what’s called the Networking Uncommons at the Association’s midwinter meeting in Philadelphia in January 2014. Maurice Coleman (pictured on the left) at one point asked whether anyone had seen or used a Google Glass yet; turns out that Jason Griffey (pictured on the right) not only had tried the device, but had his Google Glass with him—which quickly let to the conversation you see here: Maurice and Jason experimenting with Glass by trying to communicate via Glass and a smartphone while the rest of us tried to see how it worked by using laptops to join the onsite-online conversation. We could easily have extended the experiment to online colleagues who weren’t in that room. The point is that sometimes the technology becomes an integral part of the conversation, and we build upon those conversations to further incorporate the tools into what we are doing on an as-needed basis. But it all starts with a willingness to experiment and play, and to recognize that the failures we have up front in trying to learn and use online technology for meetings and webinars lead to wonderful successes. [You can read more about this experiment in a piece I wrote for the American Libraries blog on January 25, 2014: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blog/hanging-out-tech-crowd]
- Let’s dive into our explorations together a little more by starting with evidence-based research in learning circles. Research I’ve been following from a variety of sources over the past few years consistently shows that the majority of people engaged in online learning find that good online learning opportunities produce results “as good as or better” than good face-to-face learning opportunities—which is something a lot of our colleagues don’t understand because, frankly, they haven’t been exposed to great online learning opportunities. That doesn’t mean everyone shares this opinion, but it does offer a good starting point for us if we want to explore what works and what doesn’t work.
- One example, from I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States Copyright ©2013 by Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC: “The reports in this series have consistently found most chief academic officers rate the learning outcomes for online education ‘as good as or better than’ those for face-to-face instruction, but a consistent minority consider online to be inferior…..Academic leaders at institutions with online offerings have a much more favorable opinion of the relative learning outcomes for online courses than do those at institutions with no online offerings.” [Document retrieved July 22, 2014 at: http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf] You can find plenty of additional information through an online search for “studies comparing online and face to face learning” and through educational databases
- Moving over to a opinion-based point-counterpoint exchange from Bloomberg Businessweek in 2009 on the topic of face-to-face business meetings vs. online [virtual] business meetings, we find many of the opinions that are familiar to us: From the “pro” side, for example: “In these tough economic times, advancing technologies are making virtual events not only a less expensive replacement for physical meetings but also a superior one. Why do we have meetings and events? 1) to exchange information; and 2) to network. Virtual meeting and event technology can facilitate these two objectives easily.” From the “con” side, for example: “Asking if virtual meetings will replace live meetings is like asking if singles’ chat rooms will replace real dating. Human face-to-face interaction is, and will continue to be, the most effective form of communication. It’s simple. Live meetings deliver the rich, potent experiences that virtual meetings can’t. They deliver motivation along with messaging, and inspiration with information.” [Document retrieved July 22, 2014 at: http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2009/01/virtual_meetings_will_erase_face_to_face.html]
- I have to admit that over the past several years I’ve gone from having an overwhelmingly strong preference for face-to-face interactions to seeing the value of doing some work face to face, some work online, and some work that seamlessly interweaves onsite and online interactions. Let’s explore a few examples of this together to see what it suggests for your own work in your own settings, starting with basic ways to run online meetings. First point to make: Planning is still essential. You still need great agendas, designed to propel discussions toward successful decision-making. What you’re seeing here is a the PowerPoint “Slide Sorter” view of one of the monthly online meetings I conducted for American Society for Training & Development colleagues a couple of years ago. Things to note: Most slides have minimal amounts of text and are accompanied by visual elements—photographs of people providing reports. There are playful images meant to inspire discussion. And there are even screenshots of online resources we were exploring together. What you don’t see is that I treated this the same way I treat any business meeting: I created an agenda where items were arranged in a sequence to produce results; the slides were an agenda and a part of the conversation but didn’t drive (or limit) the discussions; and there was always room from deviate from the issues simply by returning to the title slide or the slide indicating we were in question-and-answer mode. A key tip: Just as I have already suggested that technology doesn’t drive the session, I want to suggest that slides don’t drive the conversation—they are an integral part of what we’re doing, but people, communication, and decisions are at the heart of online meeting facilitation just as they are in onsite meeting facilitation. And we need to fight the urge to read content from slides. Remember, our audience members can read; they don’t need us to bore them by reading slower (or faster) than they can read and absorb content themselves.
- And let’s not lose sight of the fact that the end of the meeting isn’t necessarily the end of the conversation. Just as we often distribute minutes of face-to-face meetings, we can re-use our PowerPoint slides by sending them out to those who were able to attend as well as those who weren’t. We can post them on an intranet site or in a shared folder using Google Docs or Dropbox. The screenshot here, by the way, shows how one of the slides, accompanied by my speaker notes, helps remind everyone about key points covered, and when I included typed up minutes that reported key items discussed and decisions made, even those who weren’t able to attend walked away with a good sense of what occurred. Any questions before we move on?
- Our professional associations—the American Library Association, the Association for Talent Development (formerly the American Society for Training & Development), and many others—bring us together for a variety of onsite meetings that also serve as tremendous learning opportunities. As we continue exploring the possibility of carrying those onsite meetings to offsite participants, we find—as I have for a variety of organizations--that we can connect onsite and online colleagues through a variety of means, including: Bringing offsite presenters onsite via Skype or Google Hangouts, and Using Twitter to capture onsite highlights that offsite colleagues can see as events are unfolding or review later through the use of conference hashtags that isolate certain threads of the conversations and meetings; in the best of all situations, offsite colleagues can, while meetings and other learning opportunities are underway, participate by tweeting in questions that presenters and other participants can answer A huge tip: if you’re going to incorporate a live Twitter feed into the conversation, be sure to publicize it well in advance of the event, and have a partner in the room with you to monitor and respond to tweets coming from within the room as well as from offsite participants. I have also been experimenting successfully with active participation in onsite meetings and conferences via Twitter when I haven’t been able to be onsite, and the result sometimes is the very rewarding question from onsite colleagues: “Are you here?” The answer, of course, is “in a very important way, yes, I am there” because I’m seeing online what is happening and interacting at a significant level rather than simply retweeting messages from others. Any questions, at this point, about how this could work for you?
- To bring this full circle and turn this session in on itself: We’re in the middle of a webinar about how to lead engaging meetings and webinars. And if we’re at all successful together, you’ve been so engaged that you haven’t been taking time to answer phone calls, check your email, wander away for a cup of coffee, or engage in any of the other things that so often distract us from online interactions. Let’s note what we haven’t seen so far: There is not a lot of text on slides. You are not seeing endless lists of bullet-point items (that the presenter or learning facilitator reads to you even though you’re completely capable of reading them yourself). There is no clip art that put you to sleep rather than engaging you. (And note, in retrospect, that many of the photographs have included images of people to remind us that our real goal is to effectively reach other people online)
- Let’s return to one of the basics of effective online meetings and webinars—the need for interactions: Please type your responses to this question into the chat window, and feel free to jot down your ideas and any others you like from the chat window so you can continue creating a plan of action that you can use as soon as this session is over.
- Let’s look at a few in-depth resources you might want to explore over the next few weeks: Bonnie Elbaum, Cynthia McIntyre, and Alese Smith, all affiliated with the Concord Consortium in Massachusetts at the time their book was published, offer what they consider to be the seventeen essential steps of preparing online learning sessions which will keep instructors and learners equally engaged. The book opens with a section on preparing an online course and includes tips on how to build a course outline, set clear deadlines to encourage effective learning, and planning for quality. The middle section of the book moves into elements of designing a course which helps students maintain their focus, develop effective collaborations which foster learning, and literally stay on course. The concluding section on how to teach online is followed by an extensive checklist which summarizes the contents of the entire book for anyone involved in developing and delivering online learning opportunities.
- Jennifer Hofmann, an e-learning consultant and president of InSync Training, LLC, combines summaries, tips, and examples to familiarize trainers and others with the challenges of creating and conducting successful online sessions. The introductory chapter to the book includes a valuable and detailed table of features commonly found in live online learning environments; the table is accompanied with illustrations to help readers understand how each feature works. The second chapter, “Facilitating in the Synchronous Classroom,” is a wonderful primer which outlines facilitators’ roles in directing learning while helping participants communicate and collaborate online; reminds presenters and facilitators that flexibility and an ability to work well in stressful situations are key components to success in online presentations; and discusses key resources—including the use of a producer or assistant—for those engaged in online presentations. The remainder of the book provides suggestions for facilitating effective communication, managing the online learning environment and technology, and conducting online meetings and other live events. Among the appendices are a “Synchronous Software Features Checklist,” “Synchronous Classroom Management Checklists,” additional “Recommended Resources for Synchronous and Blended e-Learning,” and a glossary of terms for those unfamiliar with online learning.
- Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, building from work which began while they were Ph.D. students in 1993, offer online presenters an educators’ view of how to create and sustain effective online learning opportunities which lead to communities of learning. Their focus is on “teaching and learning” rather than on technology (p. xvii); the result is rewarding and inspirational. The first of the two sections of the book concentrates on the philosophy and mechanics of developing communities of learning online; the second section explores hands-on methods for producing those communities and includes explicit guidance on how to inspire collaboration by providing learners with clear guidelines as well as effective facilitation and feedback (pp. 111-125). A chapter on transformative learning (pp. 129-143) makes a strong case for how effective online learning can be by providing learners with time for engagement and reflection, and also reminds readers that effective online learning is a learner-centered process (p. 135). Sample course outlines, syllabi, lists of learning objectives, and online course guidelines make this an indispensable tool for anyone involved in online presentations and online learning. You’ll be hearing more about the importance of building communities online rather than simply focusing on one-shot meetings and sessions, so this is a book you might want to explore further as we continue our explorations together.
- This wonderful blog post, written in 2008, remains one of my favorite introductions to online presentation skills. Michele Martin, whose popular The Bamboo Project blog has lucidly explored technology and learning strategies, provides a primer for those completely unfamiliar with the mechanics of conducting effective online presentations. Among her nine tips are: expect to spend much more time preparing an online presentation than is required for face-to-face work; write a script; have back-up support during the live, online event; and don’t hesitate to deviate from the script. If you’re going to read one—and only one—thing this week about online presentations, this is the one to pursue: http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/2008/01/what-i-learned.html
- Let’s wrap this part of the session up with a few basic tips and reminders: Practice is at the heart of all we do. The more we practice, the more comfortable we will be—which leads to greater successes and prepares us for how to recover from those moments when our efforts don’t match our expectations. (Please don’t forget that we’ve built practice sessions into this series; it’s not too soon to be thinking about whether you want to participate in those master classes and what content you might be developing for a 10-minute online practice presentation for your colleagues here in the series.)
- Experimentation is part of our practice. It often produces magnificent results we would not otherwise achieve. It also contributes to the levels of confidence we eventually feel.
- Failure—although sometimes costly—is an essential part of learning. If we recognize that failure is part of the learning process, we have removed a level of fear that might prevent us from reaching the goals we set for ourselves.
- Time for another brief period for reflection: Please type your responses to this question into the chat window, and feel free to jot down your ideas and any others you like from the chat window so you can continue creating a plan of action that you can use as soon as this session is over.
- Even the issue of trying to work with an audience you cannot see online allows us to build upon what we already know but don’t often consider. Working online doesn’t mean our audience is invisible to us. One of our great novelists, Kurt Vonnegut, suggested many years ago that he was able to write effectively because he always had a specific reader in mind—for many years, his sister. If we are able to picture someone in our audience, we’re well on our way to doing what we’ve done when we write to people who aren’t physically present. It’s that connection to people that keeps our meetings and our webinars lively—and we certainly, if we are successful, receive very helpful feedback in the form of typed-chat comments or, with some of our more sophisticated tools, the visual cues coming across our screens. Another tip: if you’re completely new to online meetings and presentations, you might want to have another person in the room with you so you have someone to make eye contact with at certain points in your presentation.
- Once we remember to picture members of our audience, we can more comfortably move into the act of addressing those members. As you have seen throughout this session, we’re able to interact at various significant levels. We can use the chat window—and we increase engagement if we remember to read the typed comments with those who may not be able to see them—a great way to acknowledge the comments and help your online colleagues feel a visceral connection with you and others involved in the meeting or presentation. We can also, when video feeds are available (via Skype, Google Hangouts, or Blackboard Collaborate, for example), see some members of the audience. And when we’re in the most sophisticated of settings—through variations of the telepresence efforts mentioned earlier in today’s session—we sometimes can become so engaged that we forget we’re not all in the same physical space.
- Time for a final discussion designed to help you apply what you have learned today: Please type your responses to this question into the chat window, and feel free to jot down your ideas and any others you like from the chat window so you can continue creating a plan of action that you can use as soon as this session is over.
- Let’s do a visual summary of what we have explored: We began with the idea that there is continuity between our onsite and our online meeting and learning opportunities—people and communication are the focus; technology is the tool.
- We briefly reviewed a number of online presentation platforms available to us, ranging from telepresence technology from Cisco and meeting tools like Adobe Connect and WebEx to social-media tools including Skype and Google Hangouts. We even heard about how tools like Twitter can be incorporated into our online interactions as presentation tools.
- We saw a variety of resources that we can turn to for in-depth exploration of the skills and techniques that lead to successful online meeting and webinar facilitation.
- And we talked about ways to increase our confidence and effectiveness online—through practice, experimentation, and acceptance of failure as part of our learning process. When we come together next week, in the second of these four sessions, we’ll learn about assessing the need for a meeting or webinar, and how to address those needs.
- A few resources worth exploring…
- A bit of background: If we use PowerPoint’s “Slide Sorter” view again briefly to go under the hood a bit, we can actually see how today’s webinar was designed to demonstrate what it is trying to convey… You can see that: There was a deliberate effort to interweave imagery with text Bullet points were not part of the program—even the visual review at the end used repeated imagery to help you remember what was offered Use of color in the headlines provided some subtle guidance: Green headlines were used for discussions, red for presentation of new information, and blue for introductory or summary material Plenty of white space was incorporated into the slides to make them as easy to absorb as possible Discussions were built into the presentation at regular intervals to help keep everyone engaged