Reflecting on Webinars and Pushing the Boundaries of Instructional Design

Well…that was quite the experience!

After witnessing a good number of webinars and presenting one myself over the last few weeks, I have to say that it is indeed an art! There are so many ways in which you can lose control in a webinar – technology issues, vociferous chat – that you really have to think meticulously about how to best shape the instructional experience for your audience. From my own personal webinar experience, there were so many issues with coordination, audio problems, and unanswered chat questions that it felt overwhelming. It made me really appreciate a good webinar when I saw one, and my classmates displayed some excellent examples of a good webinar!

One thing that I learned is that even if you have technical issues or some mistake is made in a webinar, that does not necessarily define your audience’s experience with your webinar (as was the case for Anna and Kate’s presentation). I was pretty set in my assumption that people are more judgmental in an online forum and would be less forgiving of mistakes. Maybe it was because our class members are more sympathetic with each other, but I did not really find that to be the case. If presenters made an effort to be transparent about their difficulties and constantly communicated their efforts to fix issues, webinar participants tended to be forgiving and kept in good humor.

In terms of the instructional value of webinars, I am still on the fence as to their potential. They are great for introducing learners to new topics and asking critical questions, but they are also limited in their interactivity. You can be creative with the chat or the audio/video features, but I have not seen any examples where you would be able to hold an in-depth, interactive lesson on a consistent basis. Maybe that is not the point of the webinar, but I really wonder how we can push the boundaries of this medium so that we create more meaningful learning experiences. It’s a question I’ve wrestling with the entire semester: how can we think beyond these concepts of information literacy and transfer to create more helpful and innovative instructional design strategies? Maybe it’s yet another case of reinventing the wheel. Or maybe we have an opportunity as librarians to think of new possibilities in instruction that previous generations have never been able to do before. In any case, I am hopeful that we as a class will think of new ways to shape, iterate, and assess the library teaching experiences that impact people's lives. 

The Webinar Experience and Library Land Influencers

One of the main things I learned from our overview of webinars last week was that there are many things that can go wrong in a webinar! There are the myriad technical issues, such as the BlueJeans fiasco in class where PowerPoint would not sync with our screens and we would be redirected out of the session. As other classmates mentioned in their webinar watching experiences, sometimes the presentations would just be bad. The presenters misrepresent their content or they do not include images to capture attention, for example. In my opinion, most of these issues can be overcome by repeated practice, knowing the needs of your audience, and embedded expertise on the subject at hand. I guess I will know for sure during our webinars next week!

Speaking of our webinar project, I am happy I have a partner instead of doing it alone. Taking turns moderating and presenting is not only a relief in terms of handling responsibility, but it also gives you better vantage points of how webinars are conducted and how they serve their audience. If I was presenting the whole time, I might be unaware of an extensive conversation in the chat box, meaning I could be missing out on the questions my audience has or the key points of the presentation that capture their interest the most. Shutting yourself off to any one part of this webinar instructional experience does a disservice to your own professional development, as either experience of presenter or moderator informs how your instruction adapts and evolves for future teaching.

For this week, we were tasked with finding social media influencers in Library Land and identify whether they have a professional presence on at least two platforms.  Fortunately, I found this task to be quite easy due to my creepy, yet ingenious, networking habit of logging people I meet at conferences or internships into a spreadsheet. I picked around five people from this spreadsheet and found some of the social media platforms they use to share their professional knowledge. Twitter, no surprise, was the most common platform that these influencers used to talk about librarianship or user experience research. LinkedIn was also a common platform, but I do not find it useful in the sense of learning professional expertise because LinkedIn is more of a platform where the point is to be on it rather than generate meaningful content, much like Facebook. I think what surprised me was seeing how many of these influencers connected to their Pinterest pages, which not only documented Library Land fascinations but also their own personal hobbies or pop culture obsessions. I am not sure how powerful Pinterest is as a networking tool, but it does nicely blend the personal and the professional in a tasteful way. It made me wonder how these influencers portray themselves depending on the platform and whether a following on a certain platform leads to more opportunities than others. Overall, I would say this exercise helped me understand how influence can be defined and re-defined on different platforms as well as reiterate how vital a social media presence is in order to stay professionally relevant within our respective occupations.

Expertise in Any Format

I had a lot of fun doing the one-shot workshops last week! Being both a facilitator and a participant in workshops are really different roles that give you interesting perspectives as to how to craft a workshop that really gets you to learn something. As a facilitator, I faced challenges with wanting to specifically convey how mine and Nicco’s topic of algorithmic accountability in government related to our previous discussions in class, but I also had to account for the limited amount of time that we had for all the components of our workshop. As a participant, I just had to go with the flow and throw myself into the activities and questions that the facilitators asked of us. Seeing both sides allowed me to conclude what I liked and didn’t like in workshops.

First, I really like interactivity and most participants seem to like that as well. In our evaluations, participants were grateful that we had an activity outside the classroom that created more opportunities to participate in the greater discussion. Second, I don’t like being lectured at during most of a workshop, and participants sent feedback that our workshop introduction was too long and we should have left more time for discussion. I felt the same way with other workshops where I was a participant, as I would have preferred to talk about the issues with a partner rather than hear numerous lecture slides about a topic. Third, I don’t like being thrown into discussion situations where I have to act as an expert to a topic I just learned about. I saw this play out in a few workshops in my group and it seemed to be a result of not thinking through how participants would be feeling at a certain stage in the workshop. Overall, I think the one-shot workshop can only be done well when you have the dual perspective of the facilitator and the participant in mind at all times. It’s not only important to consider “how can I convey all this in a short amount of time?” but also “how will my participants think about this topic by the end of my teaching?”

This week, each of us was tasked with watching a live or archived webinar among a wide range of information topics. I decided to go with a webinar on makerspaces from last year because I always got these email notifications from American Libraries about their webinars, so I wanted to try one of them on a topic I was interested in. The webinar itself was a panel discussion about the strengths and challenges of implementing makerspaces in libraries, which is a hot topic that generated a lot of questions and side conversations in their provided chat box. I ended up really liking the format because I had the option of listening to the expertise of the panel and taking notes or poring through the chat discussion and seeing how other librarians thought of this topic. One of my big takeaways was that webinars can be a little chaotic because you do not always have control of where a conversation is going. The chat could be having an entirely separate discussion from your presentation. And if you have a panel discussion, it can be difficult to facilitate expert contributions in a way that works with your initial framing of the conversation. It’s precisely different from a one-shot workshop because the virtual space complicates who the focal point is for your audience. Regardless, I think a good webinar depends on focusing on an intriguing idea that captures your audience’s attention and provides a shared experience of knowledge where expertise is openly accessed by all.

I think no matter the format of learning, great takeaways can be achieved if the instructor has that expertise to drive thoughtful pedagogy. As the examples from How People Learn demonstrate, teachers are not good teachers simply because they excel at a certain method, but because they “have a deep understanding of the structure and epistemologies of their disciplines, combined with knowledge of the kinds of teaching activities that will help students come to understand the discipline for themselves.” [1] As it is for other professions, if librarians do not understand the principles and trends that underlie conversations about algorithms or makerspaces, they will not be as effective with their teaching no matter the methods they employ. Whether that is information literacy principles or theories of transfer, librarians need those theories in order to craft effective practice.  

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[1] How People Learn, p. 163.