Hosting the Perfect Webinar (Part 1: Technology)

As part of the Applied Practice in Blended and Online Education module I will be presenting an expert session on mobile learning. This will be hosting within Napier's Blackboard Collaborate environment which I have used in the past as a student but never as the host of an event. Unfortunately my own university does not have any kind of webinar platform at the moment so I decided I better take a look at the available options if I am to host further webinars in my own teaching.

We have a very small budget for this kind of thing so I decided to begin by experimenting with free services. As part of my mentoring with fellow geekucator Nicky I decided to give google + hangouts a try. google + hangouts is a free platform for hosting online meetings with up to 10 participants. Unfortunately for whatever reason I could only see a white screen beside the chat window and Nicky could not hear or see me. We therefore had to check out some of the alternatives.

A search for free webinar services brings back a huge amount of results. Some services are financed by advertising, others offer limited free services with additional features available at a price (freemium), and others have very tight restrictions on the number of participants - in one case it was a site offering the chance to host a webinar with only one participant!

After technical problems with another couple of sites we finally had success with liveminutes which offers free webinars for up to 20 participants. I had to create an account on the site which took about a minute and then we were up a running. The site produces a link which you can send to participants or you can email invitations directly. The tool seems to include all the standard webinar features such as a whiteboard, audio and video chat, and uploading of files. What didn't immediately seem to be obvious were interactive features likes polls or questions. I will have to investigate the site a bit further to find out if these features are available. This is something I definitely want to use in my expert session because without any audience participation I think a 60 minute webinar could feel very long indeed - for both the participants AND the presenter. The techniques and content I decide to use will be the subject of my next blog.

I do want to mention a couple of features of liveminutes that I did especially like - as I have little experience of webinar software I don't know if other programmes offer these too. I received an automatic email message from liveminutes reminding me to close my meeting because I hadn't done it properly. On closing the meeting there was also an option to have all of the notes produced during the meeting saved automatically into a pdf file. This is an excellent (and low effort) way to make sure everyone has all of the details from a meeting and doesn't have to take notes themselves. It is perhaps not quite the full recording facility that I know some webinar platforms offer but at this price ($0) I can live with that.

Finally, I should mention an excellent website that I visited again whilst trying to find free webinar tools. Richard Byrne's award winning blog, freetech4teachers.com, has links to a lot of free software as well as articles and reviews. It should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in this area.

Now I am going to get busy deciding how to avoid "death by Powerpoint" - the answers will (hopefully) be revealed in my next post.

Neil