Reflections on webinars

Category: News
Date: Monday 8 June 2020

This and the previous post were written by Jane Heath, Lecturer in EAP and module co-leader on a presessional course at the University of Leeds.

Introduction

Academic English for Postgraduate Studies Level 3 (AEPS3) is an English for General Academic Purposes pre-sessional course for international students who intend to start postgraduate courses in many different disciplines at the University of Leeds. This term, the course has been delivered online for the first time. We hold webinars with our students, who are mainly based in East Asia, the Middle East and Leeds, three times a week. The first webinar is a follow-up to students’ independent work on the Academic Language and Literacies strand of the course, which is the main strand. The second is a language workshop, in which students work on areas of academic language that their tutors have identified as needing development. The third is a seminar, based on the weekly lecture that students have watched independently.

Tutors on AEPS3 have reported a wide range of experiences with webinars. Some team members (including module leaders) had concerns about how much of an impact their webinars were having on students’ learning, whereas other team members had more confidence in the effectiveness of their teaching through webinars. We decided to create a shared document in which we could share the challenges that we were experiencing as well as strategies and solutions for overcoming these challenges. Through this document, we have been able to reflect on our own practice and what we might learn from others. We hope that these reflections can prove useful for others who are new to leading webinars or who would like to improve their own practice.

This document is based on contributions from the AEPS3 term 3 team: Roya Alimalayeri, Neil Appleton, Helen Butt, Dan Collins, Denise de Pauw, Kat Dixon, Alister Drury, Laura Dyer, Ahmed Elgadri, Samira Esat, Laurie Essien, Natalia Fedorova, Renata Lebioda-Green, Jane Heath, Fiona Heubeck, Joanna Kolota, Stephen Lewin, Uma Maniam, Mark Matthews, Cat Mildred, Liam Newton, Mick Parkin, Rachel Perkins, Jess Poole, Paul Ridley, David Rojinsky, Warren Sheard, Jay Subhan, Valerie Taiwo, Robert Taylor, Liz Such, Jenny White, April Zhang.

Challenge 1

Some students don’t seem to be talking much in breakout rooms / Some students seem to stop talking when the teacher enters.

Strategies and solutions

Teachers can turn their video off while students are in breakout rooms to make their presence less obtrusive and then turn it back on in the main room.
Students might sometimes be quiet because they have not fully understood the task instructions or content. It is possible that they don’t want to admit this in the main room. It is, therefore, a good idea to check understanding thoroughly before sending students into breakout rooms (as we would in the classroom).
Students might also sometimes be quiet because they haven’t done the preparation work for the lesson. The teacher might need to find a way to check whether students have done the work. For example, students could save a document in a OneDrive folder or send the teacher a photo of their notes. Teachers should speak to any students who haven’t prepared about the importance of this.

Challenge 2

It can be difficult to gauge whether students have understood something.

Strategies and solutions

It is important to use nomination and targeted questioning in order to assess student understanding. Nomination can be used to start a discussion, and then other students can be invited to contribute.
As it is not possible to question every student, if students are placed in pre-assigned breakout rooms, the teacher can then nominate one student from each group to feed-back on that group’s understanding.

Challenge 3

Some students are not engaging with webinars. They are present but their cameras are off and they don’t seem to contribute. Some students are speaking in Chinese.

Strategies and solutions

Unfortunately, some students may not have sufficient bandwidth to use their cameras and there is not much we can do about this.
As suggested above, nomination is very important here, particularly with large numbers of students from East Asia, as it increases the participation of some students who might not contribute otherwise.
Through nomination, some tutors have ‘caught’ students who had connected to the webinar but weren’t at their computers. As students now know that they could be nominated at any time, they have realised that they need to be at their computers and at least listening to the discussion.
Some teachers simply ask students to turn their cameras on, explaining that in the same way that it helps students to be able to see teachers’ non-verbal responses, it helps teachers to be able to see students’.
Some teachers ask students to respond through their cameras (for example, thumbs up/across/down) to encourage them to keep their cameras on. This strategy can also help teacher gauge student understanding (see challenge 2).
Quieter students can be encouraged to ask questions through the text chat or to ‘raise their’ hand’ in order to ask a question.
Students who are continuing to speak in Chinese or other languages in breakout rooms need to be challenged and reminded of the reasons why we would wish them to speak in English.

Challenge 4

It can be difficult for teachers to interact with all students in a group of up to 24 students during a webinar.

Strategies and solutions

One possible solution is team-teaching. Instead of holding a two-hour webinar with group 1, the group 1 teacher would hold a one-hour webinar with group 1, with the group 2 teacher supporting her/him. The group 1 teacher would then support the group 2 teacher with her/his one-hour webinar.
One advantage of this is that team-teaching may make teachers feel less isolated. The teachers could take on different roles, with one teacher (the group’s usual teacher) leading the seminar and the other teaching supporting by monitoring the chat.
However, other teachers felt that this could add too much complexity for teachers and students, particularly as teachers may have different ideas for how they would like to conduct the session. There was also a question of whether the supporting teacher would then need to get to know a whole new group of students.
Another possible solution was holding shorter webinars with smaller groups. For example, instead of a 90-minute webinar with 24 students, there would be three 30-minute webinars with 8 students. This would allow teachers to get to know students more quickly and students might feel more comfortable.

Challenge 5

Teachers and students want more time to engage with each other / teachers would like more opportunities to build rapport with their group.

Strategies and solutions

Teachers felt that it was important to create ‘social spaces’ where students can chat informally with their tutors. Some tutors have done this through posts in their group’s channel; for example, they have shared holiday photos. Tutors could also use FlipGrid for this purpose.
Some teachers noted that students are often late to webinars, possibly due to connection issues, so they use the first 10-15 minutes as informal chat time. Some students have joined in with this part of the lesson but not other, more formal parts.
Other teachers give some extra time to students who would like to stay and chat at the end of a session, mirroring the chats that they would have with students as they left the classroom at the end of a lesson.

Challenge 6

In the mid-module survey, some students commented that they did not feel comfortable in breakout rooms as they didn’t know the other students.

Strategies and solutions

Tutors can pre-assign students to breakout rooms or assign them to specific rooms during the webinar (possibly giving them a task to complete in the meantime as this can take some time). Thus, they can use the same groups for most tasks, although there will be some tasks for which tutors wish to mix students up.
There has also been some discussion of community building this week. It might be too late for AEPS3, but on future courses, group teachers could share weekly posts on topics not related to the course in order to start discussions and build a sense of belonging to the group. This might help students feel more comfortable in webinars.

Challenge 7

Some students can be passive in webinars and don’t seem to expect to do very much.

Strategies and solutions

Breakout rooms can be used effectively to set students tasks to complete. Students can be asked to share either a summary of their discussion or an actual document that they have produced in the main room as evidence of the work that they have completed.
Many tutors are using shared OneDrive documents for collaborative tasks during webinars, allowing them to encourage all students to participate and give live feedback.

Challenge 8 (specific to AEPS3)

Some tutors felt that the language workshop webinars could more usefully be used to give students more practice at fluency.

Some tutors felt that there should be a webinar for the Academic Strategies sessions, particularly the reading sessions.

Strategies and solutions

It is too late to make such a major change on this course, but we will bear this in mind for future iterations. It is likely that the language workshop and reading sessions will be swapped in future online iterations of AEPS3 in light of this feedback from tutors.

Conclusions

Our tutors often pointed out that the challenges they faced when leading webinars were similar to the challenges faced in the classroom, and could be resolved using the same strategies and solutions. The reflection was a useful exercise in that it allowed tutors who were less confident to share their concerns and tutors who were more confident to share the good practices that they were using. Overall, we seem to be growing in confidence as a team, both when it comes to leading effective webinars and when it comes to using technology effectively more generally.