Effective Interactive Webinars : Methods to facilitate learning in open collaborative learning environments. A toolbook for practitioners/facilitators

Webinars are becoming an increasingly popular arena for the dissemination of information, primarily in the form of online presentations to large distributed audiences. However current practice shows a tendency towards largely oneway communication, especially when the number of participants rises above thirty. This happens at a time when oneway presentations or lectures are increasingly being questioned as an environment for effective learning. Many have experienced large webinars, which are just as tiresome as monotonous lectures, or even worse. As webconferencing, services get more traction both within the educational and corporate sphere, the need to develop online pedagogies, methods and formats that fit with learning goals and build on what is known about adult learning has become urgent. Universities, adult education centres as well as companies and institutions have been experimenting with the use of web-conferencing services to support learning. However many experiments to increase flexibility and to open the learning arena still seem to be based on replicating on-line what has been done on-site with mostly disappointing results. During our workshop we will present, demonstrate and discuss pedagogies which can help make webinars vibrant learning environments.Webinar – for interactive and collaborative learning. Nordplus project NPAD-2014/1032