To date, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected a billion and a half students around the world. To slow down the spread of the virus, governments and school administrators have also closed schools in 191 countries.
While this has certainly caused a lot of disruption in education, teachers are just as affected. Many of them are barely trained on giving lessons online, much less moving an entire academic year to cyberspace—which presents its own problems. Giving them during a pandemic is on another level entirely.
Some teachers and university lecturers are now looking for virtual ways to teach their students, which include online courses and webinars. However, rapidly transitioning to online classrooms and web conferencing may do more harm than good if the professor is not fully prepared to navigate this medium. To that end, this article aims to explain this new way of teaching and how to make the most of it.
What is a webinar?
A webinar is a portmanteau of “web” (referring to the internet as a medium) and “seminar” in the sense of a lecture or an educational session. By taking its parts separately, you can see that it’s a presentation conducted online, with a host (i.e., a teacher) and attendees (students). It typically uses a tool called a web conferencing or webinar software to facilitate these sessions.
Some terms are also synonymous with a webinar, such as an online workshop, online seminar, a live class, or interactive training. Note that some, like a webcast or a web conference, are different beasts entirely. A webcast is much like a normal TV broadcast but streamed (or “cast” on the web), with an audience of over 50,000. A webinar, by contrast, can only accommodate up to a thousand attendees at a time, and a web conference with a still smaller audience.
Due to its nature, a webinar is also highly interactive. It typically has a chat where students and attendees can answer questions or virtually “raise hands” to discuss certain points with the teacher. Other capabilities include slide sharing, annotation, and recording.
Attending a webinar is as simple as signing up for it. To do so, attendees normally need to provide their email address, after which they would receive a private link for the “room” of the webinar. Once the webinar day arrives, they simply need to click the link to join.
What are the benefits of a webinar?
In general, webinars have an advantage over other forms of online learning techniques, such as e-learning modules, because they’re interactive. This helps attendees understand the topic better than they would otherwise or by themselves. It’s also cost-effective, as it’s less expensive than other ways to get lessons across—in terms of both time and money.
For teachers, they also have several benefits, such as:
Engagement: like any classroom lecture, it helps forge a better teacher-student bond than letting students learn by themselves.
Information distribution: it helps disseminate information much more easily.
Evergreen content: topics and material can be repurposed, read, and reviewed at any time in the course (or for the next batch of students).
For more info click
here.