Interactive Webinars

[Page 414]Functionalities for the Audience

Webinar interaction fosters audience engagement with the content, accountability, and information processing and problem solving.

Most SaaS webinar platforms provide a number of features supporting or facilitating interaction, and the number, type, and quantity of features depend on the SaaS being used, but there are typical features, including the following:

Text chat/Q&A: Text chat enables communication among audience members or between presenter and audience. Text chat can be public (all participants can see text) or private (only the presenter or designated participant[s] can see text). This feature is used to invite and respond to questions, where the presenter provides participant feedback that furthers content understanding. If participants are asked to provide their response in the text chat feature, they can immediately see the responses of others (if that feature is enabled), which supports feedback, discussion, and accountability.

Polls, surveys, and quizzes: Typically in advance of the interactive webinar presentation, presenters develop polling questions, brief surveys, and quizzes to support participant information acquisition and understanding. These features, visible to all, or to the instructor only, enable participants to respond yes or no, true or false, or to choose one or several responses to a multiple-choice question.

Whiteboard and drawing tools: These tools support audience member engagement and autonomy and can be creatively used to emphasize information, and to support questions and answers, audience quizzing, and anonymous interaction. When enabled, audience members choose a type of drawing tool and, through click-and-hold on their cursors, can write on the portrayed screen “whiteboard” that is visible to all. The whiteboard can be a slide with text on it and identified places on which the drawing tool can be applied, or it can be a blank screen that supports writing.

Many webinar provisions also offer augmented feature capability at a higher fee. Higher end features revolve around the use of “breakout rooms.” Just as is the case with a face-to-face instructional interaction, where participants are asked to work in smaller groups to process information, problem solve, and so on, breakout rooms move a subset of the audience members to a separate space to engage in small group discussions and information processing. Typically, a facilitator is provided in advance for each of these rooms to manage webinar functionality and support audience member group interaction. At the end of this choreographed time, members can be repositioned together again in the “main room.”

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