Comments (2)

By Nicky Hockly, February 17, 2010 11:48 am

Closure, outcome, achievement. Ending, end of the road, conclusion. Full stop, period, finish. Which word would you choose to describe the end of your online courses? How do you handle that final stage? Do you simply send a goodbye email and unenrol everybody from the course? Do you give grades and feedback on a final exam/test/piece of project work, and then close the course down?

By Rutty

How you finish an online course is just as important    as how you start an online course. (See my previous  posts about online course beginnings, and middles). If your online group has gelled, and participants have been working well together over the period of time online, finishing a course can make them feel bereft. Here are some comments that we typically get from participants at the end of their online courses:

• I’m going to miss you all so much!
• I can’t imagine not logging in every day and reading or hearing you all — what am I going to do with my free time?
• I feel like I’m addicted to our course Moodle now. How will I survive when it’s closed???
• I feel sad now that it’s all over.

It is important online (just as it is face-to-face) to provide a space for participants to informally share lessons learned, and to say goodbye to the group. Below are two short activities for group closure online, that we have found work especially well.

Activity 1: Parting gifts*

In this activity, participants and tutor give the group a farewell or parting gift each. The idea is simple, but very effective. In your task instructions, you need to point out that gift can be almost anything. Here is a selection of gifts that have given by participants on our past courses:

• a joke, an anecdote, a poem
• a piece of music (often this is music produced by the participant him or herself, or by a spouse)
• a significant photo, or a drawing
• an unusual or amusing video, either home-made or from YouTube (here is one gift YouTube video from a participant that I particularly liked)
• an unusual website
• an audio or video farewell message to the group (here is a lovely one produced in VoiceThread by a participant in Australia)
• a favourite dish, including a recipe and photo

*Thanks to team member Ana d’Almeida for this great idea, which she adapted from a f2f training course.

Activity 2 : The most important thing I’ve learned…

In this activity, participants need to identify the ONE most important thing that they have learned during their online course. This is actually quite difficult, as they will hopefully have learned many things! But participants need to choose one thing – the thing they consider to be the most important. Interestingly, participants don’t always focus on actual course content as the most important thing that they have learned. You will also get a range of comments on process or on affective factors. Rather than doing this activity on a forum, try it out with an online notice board or poster tool, such as Glogster or Wallwisher. It’s easier to read all the contributions at once, it looks great, and it keeps contributions short. Here is an example from one of our online courses (using Wallwisher):

These are just two very short activities you can integrate into the final phase of your online course. You will also want to solicit more formal course feedback, and you may even want to set up an online community from your past participants. We have just set up a new e-community for our past participants, and I will be posting soon about lessons learned to date…

Meanwhile, if you have any activities that you use to round off your online courses, please feel free to share them in the comments section!

You may also want to read Activities for online courses: The Beginning and Activities for online courses: The Middle.

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
February 2010

Comments (4)

By Nicky Hockly, February 10, 2010 2:00 pm

In my last blog post, I suggested that a good online course is like a play or story – it has a beginning, middle and end. It has a clear storyline that develops over time, and leads to some sort of meaningful conclusion (I’m excluding books like Ulysses, or plays like Waiting for Godot from this analogy!). I suggested a number of generic ‘beginning’ activities that could be used in an online course, regardless of course content.

Photo by koukrapoc

Now I’d like to look at the middle bit of an online course.

No matter what the content area or topic of your online course, there are a number of generic activity types that can be included. For example, you can include activities that focus on:

• personalisation
• progress to date

(among others). This may sound a little vague, so here are some concrete suggestions for activities for these two middle of a course areas.

Activity 1: Personalisation

I’ve already looked at the importance of socialising activities at the beginning of an online course, but there is no need to drop socialising activities once your course gets going. Try to use short personalised activities regularly during the main part of your course. How?

• All time faves playlist

Let’s say the focus of your course is on getting teachers up to speed with technology to use in the classroom. Let’s imagine the focus for the week/module is on audio tools. How about getting your course participants to create a playlist* of their top five favourite songs of all time, in a free online music player like Grooveshark. In a forum post, each participant embeds an image of their playlist (or provides a link to it online – with password), and explains their choice of songs. Make sure you create a playlist yourself and post it up, not just as a model for participants, but to share something of yourself as well with your online students! Here’s my All time faves playlist:

*Thanks to Valentina Dodge for this great idea, a version of which she uses on our Cert ICT course.

• Audio anecdotes

What about if the focus of your course is more academic, and less focused on the practical? Say on Second Language Acquisition theory, or something equally worthy? You could encourage your participants to share anecdotes about the best/worst students they have ever taught. Or participants could talk about their own best/worst language learning experiences. Instead of getting your participants to post these anecdotes in text format to a forum, how about getting them to record their anecdotes on a free voice board tool such as voxopop?

No matter what the topic, with a little imagination you can always find a (sometimes spurious) link between content and some form of personalisation for your course participants. The spuriousness is unimportant — the personalisation is. 

Activity 2: Progress to date

Part of the way through an online course, it can be helpful for participants to review and articulate the progress they feel they have made (or not made!) to date. Here is an activity to try out.

• My Course Progress drawing

Ask your participants to use a free graphics program such as Paint or similar. Using the drawing tools, they need to draw a picture that encapsulates how they feel about their progress to date. You can do this activity as a warmer during a real time synchronous video-conferencing session, with participants all drawing on the shared whiteboard and then explaining their drawings via audio. Or it can be done as an asynchronous forum activity, with participants embedding their drawings as an image, and adding text explanations. And if you are running a blended course, you could do it face-to-face with the group, with each participant creating their image on their laptops.

This is just one activity to get your course participants to reflect on their progress on the course to date. I’ve used it on fully online courses, and on blended courses, and it always seems to work well. The great thing about this activity is not only the striking and varied visuals the participants create, share and explain, but that participants don’t need high tech skills to use a simple graphics program like Paint – and can easily do the activity even if they have never used a graphics program before.

Here are some of the drawings produced by participants on the Blended ICT course I worked on a few months back. I have not included the explanations of the drawings — you can try and guess!

[My next blog post will deal with end activities for online courses – stay tuned]

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
February 2010

Comments (17)

By Nicky Hockly, January 26, 2010 12:15 pm

Like any good play, an online course has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Okay, admittedly some good plays – like Waiting for Godot – have none of the above, but bear with me on this. Some courses are short one-act plays,  and some are full-length Shakespearean dramas – especially when real-life tragedy does unfortunately intervene, and participants are forced to withdraw because of bereavement or illness.

Photo by Flnz

Whatever sort of play (or novel, or piece of music, or opera… comments invited) you compare an online course to, a good online course should have a beginning, middle and end. Waiting for Godot may be great on stage, but it’s not the effect you’re looking for in your online course.

What you are looking for is a clearly structured sequence of learning activities and tasks that lead somewhere. You want a beginning, middle and end that relate to learning content:

• a beginning that introduces and orientates the learners to the content,
• a middle consisting of well, the actual content, and hopefully,
• an end that results in the application of the content to meaningful practice, be it learning a language or brain surgery.

But at the same time, your online course needs a beginning, middle and end that relate to the group:

• a beginning that introduces and orientates the learners to each other and the tutor (and the VLE if new to them),
• a middle consisting of learners working collaboratively and individually on tasks relating to the course content, and
• an end in which learners celebrate achievements, share final products or projects, and say goodbye to the group.

So far, so clear, and as many teachers would point out, not so different to what we do in face-to-face classes. However, as Gilly Salmon was one of the first to point out, a purely online course needs an overt socialising phase if the group is to gel, and participants are to work effectively together online during the rest of the course. The socialising, or ‘climate setting’ phase, is of paramount importance online, and it’s not always obvious how to do this online. (Of course online, just as in face-to-face classes, there will always be participants who hate working with peers, and prefer to work alone. To what extent these participants should be forced into pair work is debatable.)

Let me describe just two beginning activities for an online course. The challenge with purely online courses is to make these kinds of activities fun and challenging, and hopefully the two activities below are just that (please feel free to disagree in the comments, and/or to provide other beginning activities!):

Activity 1: Profiles 3-2-1

As one of your beginning activities on an online course, it is always a good idea to get participants to fill in their profile if you are using a VLE. You can spice up the potentially rather humdrum info participants will inevitably post by also asking them to include three, two and one things about x, y and z, e.g.:

• 3 of your favourite songs
• 2 unusual things you have eaten
• 1 thing you would change about yourself if you could

For online language students, the 3 – 2 – 1 items above can be made more or less linguistically challenging, depending on the level. Topics can also be chosen depending on who your online students are – for online teacher training courses, for example, participants could add 1 thing they particularly love about teaching…. best  to ensure a mix of unusual topics in your 3-2-1 activity though.

Task stages:

1 Ask your online students to complete their individual profiles in the VLE, including general information about themselves, and the 3-2-1 points you think will work well for the group.

2 Make sure that your own profile is already completed, and follows the same guidelines. This will be a helpful model for your students in terms of length, style and content.

3 Ask participants to read the profiles of their course colleagues, and to send an e-mail to one or two of them, asking for further information about any point(s) in the profile that interest them. You could set this up as a chain, so that each participant is sure to receive one e-mail from a course colleague, about their profile.

4 A week or so later, prepare a quiz based on the unusual information in the profiles, and get participants to complete it to see how much they remember about their course colleagues — they can of course also look at the profiles again to jog their memories! Make absolutely sure that there is one quiz question per participant profile, including yourself, and that no one is left out!

Activity 2: Glog yourself!

This is an activity that uses a great free online tool called Glogster. Glogster allows you to produce a single webpage in the form of a poster, to which you can add text, images, audio and video. It’s a sort of all singing and dancing online poster.

Here is a Glog that I use to introduce myself on online courses:

and here is another Glog made by one of our recent online course participants (reproduced with permission).
 

Glogs look great, and they combine the best of Web 2.0 tools: ease-of-use and a range of media. Your Glog is stored on a web page, so that you can reuse it (simply by pointing people to the url), and you can also update and edit it at any time by removing or changing elements.

Task stages:

1 Create your own Glog. Be warned — it can be quite addictive, and you can find yourself spending between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on how snazzy you want to get!

2 Make your Glog available to your participants, for example via a dedicated forum in your VLE.

3 Ask your participants to go along to Glogster and create their own Glogs.

4 Ask participants to share their Glog url in a forum in your VLE (or embed it into any other social media they may already have, or that you are using in your course, such as a class blog, wiki or Ning)

5 Encourage participants to visit each other’s Glogs, and to then post comments or queries about the individual Glogs, on the Glog itself or in the same VLE forum.

6 Provide a visual summary of the all Glogs produced, for example by taking a series of screenshots, and creating a visually attractive PDF (for more tips on how to create visually attractive summaries of online tasks, see my previous posting about this)

If you try out any of these beginning online activities, do let me know how it goes. Please also feel free to share any beginning activities that you use on your online courses, and that you feel work particularly well. And finally, please also feel free to explore issues such as what to do with participants who simply do not want to be involved in socialising type activities online… Over to you!

[My next two blog postings will deal with middle activities, and end activities respectively – stay tuned]

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
January 2010

Comments (5)

By Nicky Hockly, January 6, 2010 8:20 am

What makes a good e-moderator? What skills and qualities does the online tutor need? I asked our team of very experienced e-moderators what they thought the most important online skills and qualities were, and below are some of their responses.

In the spirit of a new year beginning, I invite you to take a look at the Top Ten Moderator Skills below, and select those that you would like to develop in your own online teaching during 2010. A sort of online tutor’s New Year’s resolutions – you could print out the mind map below, circle those you’d like to work on, and pin it above your desk! Very low tech, I know, but some of us still love to use bits of paper…[Made with Text2Mindmap]

Top Ten Moderator Skills

[These first two ‘skills’ are my two personal e-moderator resolutions for 2010, and are areas that I would specifically like to work on during this coming year]

1 PLN:
Develop an effective online PLN (personal learning network) that works for you. It is important for tutors not to get so bogged down in the day to day tasks of the job that they neglect their own longer-term professional development.

How? If you don’t already use Twitter, try it out (see this user guide to get started). Subscribe and keep up to date with blogs written by professionals in your area of teaching  – there’s a good blogroll for ESL/ELT on Lindsay Clandfield’s blog.

2 Enthusiasm:
No one learns anything from uninterested or unmotivated teachers, whether f2f or online. An inspired teacher produces inspired learners.

How? To maintain enthusiasm for your online work ensure that you have enough time to devote to your online students, and that there is enough variety in your work to keep you engaged. And of course, experiment and learn through your own teaching.

[These next two skills are from Valentina Dodge, based in Italy:]

3 Communication:
Online this involves completely new skills, ie. “reading” between the lines.

How? Show you are really listening to your online students by picking up on points made earlier (perhaps weeks earlier) as well as choosing written words carefully to engage in true dialogue and create a comfortable learning environment.

4 Presence:
This is about being there but not dominating the online environment. It’s often more about the exchanges and the doing than you transferring your knowledge.

How? It’s not just a question of being present (e.g. via forum responses or Skype office hours) with answers or positive feedback but involves the skill of knowing when to step in to direct as well as stepping back to allow greater peer-interaction without disappearing.

[Andrei Tarassov in Colombia says:]

5 Develop discussions:
Good tutors have the ability to explore ideas and develop arguments, promoting valuable threads.

How? Read and write carefully, and ask good questions. This can help to make forum discussions more engaging. There is room in any online course for simple forum posts, but it’s much more engaging to read and post in a thread which is a real discussion.

6 Scaffolding:
It’s important to know when to intervene and when to hold back, providing enough support, but not eliminating challenge.

How? Experience, and trial and error are probably the only ways to learn this one. How much scaffolding to provide your learners will of course depend on the online group too, as well as the subject matter – e.g. how much the group already knows about it.

[Carl Dowse in Germany highlights these two key tutor qualities:]

7 Empathy:
This allows the trainer to view the elearning process from the perspective of the participant when developing and moderating activities.

How? There is nothing as effective as doing an online course yourself to experience what it’s like to be an online student! It doesn’t have to be in the same subject area that you teach online, but could be in any area that interests you – the main point is to be on the receiving end of online teaching. It can be a real eye opener in terms of seeing what works and doesn’t online.

8 Sensitivity:
This enables the moderator to respond to and make the most of different learning styles and cultural differences.

How? Do a little research on the learning cultures and learning styles of your online students, either before or at the start of the course. Getting your online students to complete an open ended questionnaire about their expectations of online learning and your course, and about what works and doesn’t work for them in terms of learning activities, can also provide valuable insights. You could revisit this periodically e.g. in midcourse feedback.

[Finally, Kristina Smith in Turkey adds:]

9 Socialising:
We all know that fully online courses can lack the essential social element that face-to-face classes provide. An initial socialising stage with specifically social tasks in an online course is important, but after that, what can we do to ensure that groups gel and continue to work well together?

How? Keep feeding the social aspects of the course through cafe postings or sharing photos. Not too much, not too little. Friendly Monday a.m. posts seem appreciated. Regular synchronous video sessions also help of course, and meeting up in 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life can greatly enhance the sense of social presence on an online course.

10 Cycles:
A course has its own life cycle, with a beginning, middle and end. Be very aware of each of these stages within your course, and consciously cater to each of them.

How? At the beginning of the course, create a warm atmosphere, and then continue to encourage and scaffold so participants learn as much as they can. At the end of your course let participants feel a sense of achievement and also experience ‘closure’. Loads of participants write to me at the end of a course saying they feel a bit bereft when they check their mails and there are no more emails from the others and there are no more forum discussions to join.

[Note: In my next blog post I will look at specific online activities/tasks that cater to the main stages in a course cycle]

So, above we have a list of just 10 key tutors skills and qualities – of course there are many, many more! In fact the more you tutor online, the more skills you realise you need, in my experience! What about you? What are the key e-moderator or online tutors skills for you? 

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
January 2010

Comments (3)

By Nicky Hockly, December 24, 2009 10:26 am

In the spirit of summing up 2009, here are five top Twitter tweets for e-moderators and online tutors from 2009. Well, actually they’re from December 2009, but hey, this blog has only been going since November!

The thing about Twitter is that you only get 140 characters in a tweet (message), so you usually have to go to the web page itself to see if it’s worth reading. To save you a schlep, I’ve provided a quick description of the page in the tweet, so you can decide whether to visit it (or not). The five tweets below are for (respectively) online students, for wannabe online tutors, for newbie online tutors, for seasoned online tutors, and finally for jaded online tutors. Enjoy!

1 For online students 

chunian: What You Need to Know About an Online Tutor- What you need to know about online tutor comes down to understanding j… http://bit.ly/6eXZmj

• General advice for students looking for an online tutor in any discipline.
• My favourite line: One should never be afraid of asking for the assistance of an online tutor, regardless of how old they are.

2 For wannabe online tutors

MyDishBusiness: Online Tutoring Jobs – Becoming an Online Tutor http://bit.ly/7oMMnP

• Outlines the differences between career, speciality and part-time online tutoring. Useful link to further resources at the end, including articles and videos.
• My favourite line: The principal attributes that good online tutors possess include a love of the subject, detailed knowledge and the people skills to pass it on.

3 For newbie online tutors

mlmamo: Interesting post – Online research community moderation – more tips and tricks. http://bit.ly/36wiAD

• Advice on how to be an ‘authentic’ online community moderator.
• My favourite line: Pump up the fun quotient on your community by including regular featured activities…

4 For seasoned online tutors

jorge_acosta: RT @eLearnMag: 10 tips to success as an online student: http://ow.ly/N5tr

• Some useful advice to give your online students. Could be included in pre-course information, or as part of an orientation task at the beginning of the course.
• My favourite line: As a distance learning student, you will find that being pro-active and engaged in your personal learning experience will pay off in good grades and depth of learning.

5 For jaded (online) tutors

edutek: Tips for Building a Personal Learning Network on Campus and Online http://su.pr/1Mbx9g

• How to include colleagues into your PLN (personal learning network). If you’re feeling bored or unmotivated in your work, these could be perfect professional New Year’s resolutions!
• My favourite line: Colleagues can play such an important role in our development as teachers, yet most of the time we don’t make use of them in ways that really help us grow pedagogically.

Please do let me know if there is anyone else in the e-moderation world I should be following on Twitter… Thanks!

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
December 2009

Comments (16)

By Nicky Hockly, December 4, 2009 1:27 pm

Photo by Flnz

Ask an online tutor what they like most about their job, and be prepared for a lengthy answer. They will probably wax lyrical about things like having contact with people from all over the world. The chance to share and learn alongside a great range of individuals. The cut and thrust of considered online debate with interesting and informed peers. The level of support that an online group can generate for each other. The great vibe you get when an online group gels well. How you can see learning take place before your very eyes in forum discussions…. and so on.

Ask your online tutor what they like least about the job, and you invariably get the same two-word answer: forum summaries! As in, having to write them. Actually, marking assignments (another two-word answer) rates pretty high in dislikes as well…

We all know that providing summaries of often complex and lengthy forum discussions on an online academic course is a Good Thing. In case it’s not glaringly obvious why, here are some of the main reasons:

•  a forum summary does just that — it summarises. It highlights the salient points made by individuals in the discussion, and presents them in a short and digestible form. It cuts out the rambling and the pontification.
• a forum summary shows that the online tutor has actually read the posts. In fact, the good online tutor will be contributing to and developing the forum discussion as it unfolds. The not-so-good online tutor will only show up for the summary. The truly dreadful online tutor won’t bother with a summary at all.
• a forum summary clearly tells students that a discussion has drawn to a close.
• a good forum discussion summary is a resource in itself. As such, you might want to also produce a version of your forum summary as a PDF document, and store it in an easily accessible course folder. That way you can build up a bank of useful forum summaries for your students in one place. This makes the summaries easily accessible, and good for review or revision purposes.

Of course the downside of forum summaries is that they can be very time consuming to produce. The summary of a lively and wide-ranging debate may run to several pages. Summary writing is in itself a skill.

Here are a few tips to help you with forum summaries:

Tip 1: Do it!

Make sure you summarise all discussions. Include all the pertinent, insightful and incisive points made in the discussion, and ignore the dross (sorry, less useful info).

Tip 2: Use students’ names

If you’re going to name some contributors (e.g. Jane pointed out that xxx, while Joe felt that xxx, ), then try to name all of the contributors. Imagine yourself as a student reading a forum summary in which all of your course colleagues are mentioned except you!

Tip 3: Don’t use students’ names

Or rather, don’t always use students’ names in summaries. Although students report feeling a warm glow of pride when reading their own names in a forum summary, don’t labour the point. Write some summaries in which names are included, and some in which names are not included at all. A bullet point list of the main points made in a discussion may suffice (but see below for some tips on how to liven this up visually).

Tip 4: Be there

Respond as appropriate during the discussion. You may need to step in and redirect a discussion that is getting off the point. You may need to answer a query in a posting. You may want to provide a summary halfway through a discussion (this will make your final summarising job easier in the long run). It’s important to be present and visible during a forum discussion. Students need to know that you are reading, thinking about, expanding on, and responding to their comments. There is nothing worse than an absent online tutor.

Tip 5: Don’t skive

You can always get a student to produce a summary for you, but it needs to be a meaningful activity for the student, not a chance for you to skive. Students should receive credit for any summaries they produce, even if it is only lavish praise. Best to get students to volunteer to produce a summary, rather than forcing them to do so. Make sure your students have several different summary models to refer to. Summarising is a skill that students may not have, nor want or need to develop, so don’t count on the ‘students-do-the-summary’ option.

Tip 6: Make it look good

Finally, you can make the summary more interesting for you to produce (and for your students to read) by using a variety of summary types and layouts. A discussion forum summary does not always need to be purely discursive text or a series of bullet points. You can:

• produce a mind map of key points
• use tables, with and without images
• use an adjective or a single keyword as a paragraph heading for each key point, or as the organising principle for the summary
• use student names as the organising principle of the summary
• create a wordle word cloud of key words/points (www.wordle.net)
• include screenshots or visuals of processes or student products if relevant (especially if the task requires students to produce an image, or something you can take a screenshot of)

The 6 images in the slideshow below show some rather groovy-looking forum summaries from one of our online courses, the online Cert ICT. These summaries were produced by Valentina Dodge who tutors on the course (thanks Vale!). I hope they inspire you to try out some different styles for your own online forum summaries… And look forward to any tips you may have for producing ‘good’ forum summaries.

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
December 2009

Comments (2)

By Nicky Hockly, November 25, 2009 11:13 am

Photo by lizzardo

Do you need to give a conference presentation online? Don’t panic — you’ll find some tips about how to give an engaging presentation online in my last blog post. Make sure you read the comments too, there is some good advice in there!

But what about if you need to moderate a webinar or conference presentation? In other words, you don’t need to give a talk, you need to manage the session and handle the audience.  Here are some of the things that an online event moderator typically has to do:

• welcome the audience
• set the agenda for the event
• outline any protocols (e.g. don’t draw on the PowerPoint slides unless invited to do so!)
• introduce the speaker
• give permissions to speakers and participants to use certain tools such as the shared whiteboard, or the microphone
• keep track of any questions that may appear in the chat window during the talk
• moderate a question-and-answer session when the speaker has finished his or her presentation
• sum up, thank the speaker and audience, and close the session.

The online event moderator will typically do these things more or less in the order above. Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? On the whole it is, although there are a few things for the moderator to keep in mind. Here are a few tips!

Tips for online event moderators:

Tip 1: Tech check!

Well before the online event, check that the speaker knows how to use the videoconferencing software effectively. Check whether she needs to use tools such as the shared whiteboard, or will be using shared web browsing during her talk. Run at least one test session in a few days before the event to check that her microphone and web cam settings are working. Do this even if the speaker swears she knows the video conferencing software like the back of her hand! Double check that the speaker will be using the same computer on the day of the event itself. Many an online event has lost half of the audience because the speaker’s microphone and camera settings were not checked in advance, and far too long is spent at the beginning of the talk faffing around trying to get things to work! Unnecessary technical faffing is one of the quickest ways to lose your audience. Quite apart from the fact that it makes the entire event looks very unprofessional.

Tip 2: Name dropping

Check how the speaker would like to be introduced. What would the speaker like you to say about him or her? Should your intro include only professional information, or perhaps you could mention a hobby or two? Will you put a photo or two of the speakers on the whiteboard  during your intro? And are you sure you know how to pronounce the speaker’s name correctly? Iclearly remember being introduced once as Niggly Hogly instead of Nicky Hockly…

Tip 3: Who’s who & what’s what

At exactly what point during the webinar or conference session will you (the moderator) be speaking? What is your role? Let the audience know at the beginning of the online event how it is going to be structured, and what you are there for.

What sort of protocols do you want your audience to follow? Will they be given permissions to draw on the whiteboard, for example? Can they use the chat window? Be aware that if you have a chat window open during the session (highly recommended), the session participants will use it to — well, chat. And if the speaker does not keep them engaged, they will start chatting among themselves about the weather, their interests and general stuff… and just tune the speaker out. Not necessarily a bad thing, and a good online speaker will know how to use the text chat window to ensure audience participation (see my previous blog post for some tips on this!).

Tip 4: Permissions

If the speaker is going to invite participants to draw on the shared whiteboard, or to comment using the microphone, you the moderator will need to think carefully about when and how you are going to handle permissions. Microphone permissions are usually very straightforward to grant – a participant will signal that he or she wants the microphone, and as moderator you simply give permission to that individual.

Giving permissions to use drawing tools on the shared whiteboard is also straightforward, but think carefully about when you are going to give permissions. Will you give everybody drawing permissions from the beginning of the session? In that case you risk participants doodling on the PowerPoint slides during the talk (would’t be a first)! Will you give everyone drawing permissions only when the speaker invites them to draw on the whiteboard? In that case you will need to be quick in giving each individual the necessary permissions — with a large audience this might be quite time consuming, and those that you give permissions to first will have finished the task before you have given everybody permissions. … So check in advance with the speaker how long their whiteboard task(s) are going to take. This may help you decide exactly when to give drawing permissions.

During the Q&A, it’s a good idea for the moderator to simply watch the chat window, and quickly scribble down questions (and the name of the person who asked the question) on a piece of paper. These questions can then be relayed orally by the moderator to the speaker in the order in which they were asked. In fact, during the talk itself, the moderator should keep a close eye on the chat window, and note down topics or issues which participants bring up while the speaker is talking. It’s very difficult for a speaker to be fully aware of questions coming in via a text chat window while he or she is speaking. Nobody is that good a multi-tasker. It’s the moderator’s job to keep an eye on the text chat window.

Tip 6: Goodbyes

How are you going to summarise or round up the session? Will you do a short roundup activity, for example in the text chat window? Or will you simply thank the speaker and audience? If the speaker is going to include a roundup activity (see my previous blog post for some activities suggestions) — and you’ll need to check – then you could simply say a few lines summarising the talk and what you find interesting/useful. Remember to tell participants where they can access the PowerPoint slides and the session recording after the event.

These are some basic tips for online event moderators. I’d love to hear from anyone else who has had experience of moderating an online synchronous event. Can you add any tips (or warnings) for us in the Comments to this post?

Thanks!

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
November 2009

Comments (15)

By Nicky Hockly, November 2, 2009 7:30 pm

Gone are the days when a synchronous online conference was a rare event. These days it seems that everybody is doing it. From publishers to teachers associations, from companies to individuals, there are a host of online events that one can attend, from short one-hour online presentations (or webinars) to synchronous events spanning several days.

And long may it last! Attending an online event is fantastic for your own professional development. Better still, attendance is usually free, you can drink coffee (or a glass of wine) during it, and you can even attend in your pyjamas (as long as you keep your webcam turned off).

In the last two months, I’ve spoken at two online conferences, and these are my eighth or ninth online conference engagements of the past few years. Even though many of us do plenty of face-to-face speaking, we are often unsure about how to do it online. I thought it might be useful to put together a few tips and techniques for online presenters and for online moderators.

Let’s first check we are clear on the difference between an online moderator, and an online speaker. Basically, the online speaker, well, speaks, and the online moderator, ermm, moderates. In this post we’ll look at same tips for online SPEAKERS (and in my next blog post, for online MODERATORS). Hopefully that too will make the difference clear.

Tips for online speakers:

Tip 1: Keep it short

Don’t let the online conference organizers persuade you to talk for ages  Try to NEVER talk for more than 45 minutes (and even that’s a lot). Even if you know how to keep an audience enthralled for hours on end face to face (unlikely), expect 50% of that kind of concentration at best from your audience online. If you think you have 20 pearls of wisdom to share with your audience, cut it down to 10 pearls. The best scenario for an online session is 30 to 40 minutes of you, plus 15 minutes for audience questions. Max.

Tip 2: Engage your audience

The first rule of face-to-face speaking is to engage your audience, so make sure you do the same when speaking online. Listening to you doing a monologue online for 45 minutes can challenge even your keenest fan. The temptations for your online audience to simply walk way to the fridge, to phone a friend, or simply to log off and go out to the movies, are huge. You can’t compete unless you make your talk interesting and engaging. How?

One way is to make sure that you integrate little activities that require audience participation during your talk. Here are some ideas that I have used (and that seem to work):

• At the beginning of your session, find out where your audience actually are. Right now. One of the fabulous things about an online seminar is that people are usually attending from all over the world, so get them to mark their location on a world map you put on the shared whiteboard (if there is one in the conferencing software). Or ask the audience to type their location, the time, and the weather into the text chat box. You could even ask them what they are drinking or eating at that moment (believe me, almost everyone is usually drinking something).
• Give your audience an overview of the session, and what you hope you will all have learnt by the end of it. If you are using PowerPoint slides, you could include a brief outline on your first slide. Letting your audience know what you hope to achieve, and where you’re all going, allows those who are in the wrong place to leave early!
• While talking about your topic, check whether your audience have heard of or done these things/used the tools you mention/have the same opinion of something, and so on. Do this regularly, not just once. You could ask a simple yes or no question, and get your audience to type yes or no in the text chat box. If the conferencing software has features such as indicating agreement or disagreement, you could get your audience to use those in response to a simple question from you.
• Get your audience to actually do something during your online talk. Ask them to type in a definition of a term in the text chat box, before you give them the definition you plan to work with. Or get them to guess what a certain topic/tools/concept is, by typing one line in the text chat box. Getting the audience to follow you by answering questions, or predicting content, will keep everyone engaged and busy (and therefore away from the fridge and glued to their computer screen).
• Make sure you respond to what your audience contributes in this way, by saying things like. ‘’Ah, Donna says xxx, great idea, Donna – thanks’’. This may mean you briefly pause during your talk while responses start to appear. Don’t be afraid to pause for a few seconds while waiting for audience to come back to you. They are busy, they’re engaged, and a few second of silence is fine. It is a good idea to move the focus off yourself and onto your audience like this at least every 10 minutes or so. There will be less snoozing in the audience.

Tip 3: Try stuff out

Don’t be afraid to experiment. If you’re talking about a new technology tool, for example, why not set up a demo account that your audience can go along to and try out during your presentation? You could set a very short (and achievable!) task for the audience to complete using the new tool/application during the session. Let everyone see that everyone else is successfully completing the task. Then pull everyone back into the main conferencing tool. I get people to type ‘I’m back’ to show when they have completed the task, and are back in the main conferencing room. I then solicit audience feedback on the task, or point out certain features that the audience have now personally experienced for themselves by doing the task. Don’t let this kind of hands-on task go on too long though, or your audience will lose focus – a few minutes is plenty of time.

Tip 4: Round up

Apart from providing a brief summary of what you’ve covered in your talk, round up with a short fun activity. This could be as simple as asking the audience to type in two adjectives to show how they feel about the talk. Or you could ask them to type one line summarising one thing they feel they have learnt from your session. Or they could draw a quick picture of the main point of your session on the whiteboard… The idea here is to pull everything together and to get an audience reaction and some informal feedback.

Tip 5: Say thanks

And finally, don’t forget to thank your audience! Remember that they could easily have logged off during your talk and found something a lot more interesting to do…. the fact that they are still there is worth you thanking them for

I look forward to any tips or techniques you might have for online conference speakers…

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
November 2009