Growing Knowledge - Webinars

Many communities of practice use interactive webinars to deliver specific content that community members are interested in learning more about.

People are using webinars more to facilitate a meeting without having to leave the office or home. Using technology contributes to the Unversity’s commitment to Sustainability and supports accessibility. Our media services department can provide support with this. Popular webinar tools used at our University are Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Generally a webinar is a real-time event (typically a 60-minute session) that combines a teleconference with web collaboration tools. There may be information shared ahead of time with reflection questions and research links, as well as follow-up opportunities for more reflection and additional reading.

During the interactive webinars one or more speakers, accompanied by slides, will present new information. Depending on the conferencing software used, there may be different kinds of opportunities for participants to interact throughout the presentation, including brainstorming, voting, posing questions, and contributing to discussion. An archived version of the webinar and the accompanying slides is typically made available for participants who were unable to attend the real-time webinar.

An example of this is the Wellbeing lectures organised here at the University. Colleagues could book on to go to the event or view it live via webinar.

Archived webinars can be repurposed and made available for people beyond the immediate community. This may involve editing content, organising content into shorter chunks, making format changes and/or re-recording the narration. View an example here.