As we all begin to absorb the reality that our day-to-day life will be impacted by the coronavirus outbreak for some time to come, David, the Training Officer for Reading University explains that for many of us it’s an opportunity to start using technology in new ways.
With most of our students sent home and our facilities closed, we were adamant that a global pandemic wasn’t going to stop all our activities, and felt it incredibly important to try and keep some cohesion to the club whilst we all spend time apart in isolation. So we came up with a plan to keep things moving by switching all our teaching online! Here is how we did it...
Finding your audience
To gauge interest, and collect the contact details for prospective attendees, we advertised on various Facebook groups and used Google Forms (free to use for anyone who has a Google account) to gather contact information. We used this data to send out the webinar invitations to everyone. Be careful to send emails using ‘Bcc’ so that you don’t share email addresses with everybody you send it to!
Setting up and picking the right software for your needs
To run the webinars themselves, we made use of a tool called Microsoft Teams to present our lectures. Teams is free to download but the free version has some limits to what you can do with it so it might not work for everyone. Other free of charge methods are available too, such as Zoom, Skype or Houseparty. There are lots of routes to getting the same outcome, but for us, the main thing was to have some key functionality:
- Being able to share your screen so that you can present the slides to the audience
- Being able to have text chat – if everyone in the session uses their microphone it gets very noisy, very quickly and it can become difficult for the instructor to be heard over everyone else’s background noise
- Having other instructors to help field questions in the session text chat
If you have the ability, try to use more than one computer screen – one screen for the webinar software and another for you to see the slides. If you don’t have two monitors, you can usually connect a TV to your computer instead
The important thing for you will be to try a few things, do some dry-runs and see what works best!
Running the session
Our first lecture session was a great success. We had way more attendees than we had anticipated but almost everybody was able to take part in the lecture without too many technical hiccups. Most of this we put down to our writing a detailed guide for how to take part and sending that out as joining instructions. We deliberately wrote it with people who are not technically adept in mind and kept the language simple, with lots of illustrations.
During the session, we encouraged the attendees to ask questions in the text chat. Some of those questions were simple enough to answer right away and our Instructor Team handled that. But some questions needed a little more detail, so we kept a log of them and one of the team voiced the questions in the Q&A section at the end. We also opened up the Q&A session for people to turn on their microphones and ask in person any questions.
Feedback
From the comments, we got during the session and from feedback received after the event, our attendees were very happy with how the session was conducted. We identified some ways we might be able to improve for next time, but as always, it is a case of progressive steps.
All of this might sound very daunting to some, but this is really achievable for most clubs. And if not, get your members to jump into our training sessions… the more the merrier!
Have you run online training for your club?
We'd love to hear your success stories and your lessons learned so we can share these with other members - please email marketing@bsac.com with your stories. Alternatively, you can email your hints and tips to webex@bsac.com so we can update our advice.
