Is anyone remotely interested? October 7, 2009
Posted by Steve Boneham in : HowTo, presentation, Training, conferences , trackback
I’ve been asked to present a ‘webinar’ on the web2practice project for JISC RSC Eastern in December and have been thinking about how best to present to a remote audience. As someone who’s often in the remote audience for events, I’m aware of how difficult it can be to engage and maintain people’s interest. So, as this will be my first attempt to present to a purely remote audience, I’m hoping for some advice from those who give and receive presentations.
As I commented in a post on Powerpoint on UK web focus, I think engagement is the key issue for a remote audience. Looking at engagement stats for videos of some of my presentations, many more people hit stop within 5mins than have ever walked out of a live presentation (although maybe they’re just too polite!) .
So, how do I keep remote participants interested?
Here’s a rough outline of how I plan to approach this:
- Keep it short (10 mins)
- Use a very visual slidedeck (more images, less text)
- One point per slide (more slides, less time on each)
- Pre-record it (for rehersal, as a backup & to publish)
- Have spare equipment (PCs, webcams, mics…)
- Present as if I had an audience (rather than sat at my desk)
- Ensure demonstrations are well-rehearsed
- Recruit someone else to monitor the official & back-channels
Anything else you’d recommend?
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Good luck!
How about having a dry run with friends? It may not need to be the actual presentation but it would allow you to see how the dynamics of the discussion would go.
Are you just presenting or is there going to be some audience participation? Handling the volume of queries and points may be something to consider and you may need to have an assistant (or producer) to collate the common points that you can then address in your discussion.
In the online surgeries that we have started, we noticed that using the @name works well for talking directly to someone or if your replying to a general query.
Also if material can be made available in advance (say a video reference your using) this makes people happier as they may use it in advance.
to be engaged sometimes the audience needs to “do something”. Hope it goes well.
Thanks Dean!
I certainly plan a couple of practice runs and hope I can recruit some volunteers to give feedback and ask tricky questions. Don’t think that will be a problem with my (critical) friends
After the presentation/demo, we’re encouraging participants to explore the resources shown, then come back to discuss them. Myself and a colleague will be available for support.
@Zak - thanks for the tips!
Talking of your online surgeries, hope the one today goes well!
http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/surgery
How would you feel about me ‘lurking’ in there, just to see how the pros do it?!
@steve your more than welcome, come on board. It will be our second session so we are learning as we go. One more thing we noted in session one, was that the use of audio wasnt that great. As everybody has to listen to a conversation that may not be of use to them. So we are going to try and stick to using the text chat facility for Q & A
Cheers
Use some sound bytes, Steve.