Galactic Activity 15

Deliver a live online presentation instructing the audience about a skill or process. This can be delivered using presentation slides, or a live demonstration of a system or skill.

Activity 15 – Webinar

Duration: 5 mins
Applicable Streams: Personal challenge, Leadership, Learning & Development, Workplace skills, Education, Technical, Sales, Meeting Skills, Conference/events, Sales

Aim

In this activity you are aiming to:

Present a 5 minute online “webinar”

Objectives

To do this, you will need to keep the following objectives in mind:

  1. Present on a topic that you are familiar enough with to instruct others on.
  2. Structure the webinar to encourage learning from the audience.
  3. Deal appropriately with an online audience (where possible).

The Why…

If a global pandemic showed us anything, it’s that online learning and online meetings are no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a regular part of the way the world does business. So being able to deliver engaging presentations to audiences remotely is a highly desirable skill.

Where do I start?

Choose a topic you’re familiar with, that you can teach in 5 minutes and will be useful for your audience. If you’re stuck for ideas, you may wish to poll the members of your club to see how many people know about your intended topics already, or what things they’d like to learn from you considering your expertise – so you can choose something that will really resonate with people.

The How

Specific guidelines on how to tackle this activity.

Choose a topic you are comfortable teaching others about.

It’s only 5 minutes long so it doesn’t have to be in depth or complex. Pitch the webinar at people who are not specialists in this topic.


Structure the webinar as a learning experience.

Consider setting it up in the following best practice structure:

  • What are you learning about today?
  • Why is it important to learn about this topic? (What’s in it for them?)
  • Explain the theory
  • Demonstrate the theory in action
  • Show the audience how it can be applied to their lives (the value in it for them)
  • Recap and ask for questions from the audience.

Deal with your online audience.

Remember that you won’t be facing a room of people, you’ll be facing a screen that shows your video, your screen share (if necessary) and you may or may not have access to your audience’s video feed. You may be presenting to a wall of black faceless boxes, but there will still be an audience to interact with so encourage them to communicate with you via the chat box, or set up Mentimeter (or similar) online polls so they audience can interact with you.

Variations:

  1. Live with no camera feed
  2. Live with camera feed eg Facebook Live

Tips and traps

TRAPS:

  • Planning too much for a 5 minute timeframe.
  • Presenting like you would in a face to face environment where you can rely on audience participation including live reactions to rhetorical or actual questions.
  • Not being able to operate the technology.

TIPS:

  • Practice beforehand with a group of friends or family to make sure you’re across the technology and how people will interact with you (Mentimeter or similar, or live chat boxes)
  • If using slides, ensure that you are presenting one idea
  • Practice presenting to a brick wall – because that’s about the level of interaction you’ll be getting from the sea of black boxes in front of you on the screen!

Guidelines for Program Director:

Although this can be a little difficult to set up, making this a live webinar is the whole point of the exercise so ensure that whoever is presenting is across the technology and there’s a plan in place for what to do with the audience on the day (put the speaker in a different room while the rest of the club watches on their phones with headphones etc).

The webinar can be done from home if necessary – which really does simulate a real webinar environment where everyone is not in the same room.