Daniel Kiernan & Graham Philpott, Henley Business School d.kiernan@henley.ac.uk g.philpott@henley.ac.uk
Context
MBA students, Finance
Number of participants in sessions: 26
Session length: 20 minutes
Description
Getting students to attend careers events during particular periods of term can be difficult. The
use of Collaborate was piloted to see if attendance could be increased by providing online
sessions when students typically don’t engage with face-to-face careers events.
A short 20 minute presentation was given with PowerPoint slides and included separate online
poll questions.
Students were encouraged to pose questions using the ‘Chat’ feature
Impact
Student feedback was positive.
The online event had higher attendance than would be expected for an equivalent face-to-face
session held in the same period. “We would typically really struggle to get 26 attendees to a
careers event during the summer term.”
It was easy to organise and deliver the event.
Not all of the students who pre-registered actually attended the webinar (15 attended, 17
didn’t). Most students stayed for the entire session.
Dan was able to send those that weren’t able to attend a link to a recording after the session.
Thoughts and reflections
Dan is keen to make future sessions more interactive, with more questions and responses. This
should help address attendance concerns. If you attend you get your question answered live!
Possibly have an assistant to help moderate the chat and pose questions to the presenter.
Think about the way in which you want to present your content and how this affects your ability
to manage and facilitate the session.
The PowerPoint slides were displayed on Dan’s computer in Presenter View and delivered in
Collaborate using ‘Application Share’. PowerPoint presented in this way requires 2 screens and
also meant Dan wasn’t able to see the Chat while the slides were up.
Check your camera angle and be mindful of it during the session.
If you are recording the session, remember to exit the webinar properly, using the ‘Leave
Session’ button otherwise the recording continues.
The recording captured the screen, audio/video and chat but didn’t capture the poll on screen
as this was viewed in a separate tool.
Students attended the session using the ‘guest link’. This doesn’t record the email of the
students, so you’ll need to think about how students sign-up if you want to contact them (e.g.
via email) after the session.
How should the recording of a session be made available after the session? Do you devalue the
benefit of attending the webinar if it’s made available to everyone? Should it only be sent to
attendees as an incentive to attend?
Having a recording meant Dan was able to reflect on the content of presentation and consult
with his colleagues.