What You Need to Know About Presenting a Webinar

What is a Webinar?

A webinar is a web-based seminar that is presented live over the web. PBG uses GoToWebinar as the program for our webinars. It allows viewers to interact with the presenters by typing questions into a question box that is visible to the organizer. Our webinars are recorded and posted to http://www.extension.org/plant_breeding_genomics and our YouTube channel to provide access to the presentation following the live presentation.

Goals and Audience of Our Webinars

The goal of our webinars is to provide science-based information to practicing plant breeders and students in the United States. Typically the audience of any of our webinars include a blend of researchers, educators, industry professionals and students. The information for these webinars should be presented and explained in a way that is understandable, practical, and useful to these audiences.

What Does a Webinar Look Like?

Depending on the program (edit for your program) during the live broadcast of the webinar, viewers will see:

• Your powerpoint slides,
• A question box to type in their questions, and
• An audio box allowing them to select the phone or their computer speakers to listen.

Our webinars are archived at: http://www.extension.org/pages/60426. Please take a look to see some examples.

How do I Prepare for a Webinar?

Please sign up for an eXtension ID at at http://www.extension.org/people/signup. After you create an account, please sign the contributor agreement at http://www.extension.org/people/account/contributor_agreement.

Prepare the following

• A PowerPoint slide show. Include a slide with additional resources on your topic. PBG will create the title slide and a slide of the presenters with their institutions and titles
• 1-3 sentence description of the webinar topic, scope, learning objectives, and intended audience. Please be specific about what will be learned by attendees to the webinar.
• 1-2 sentence bio of each speaker.
• A photo of each speaker.
• Optional: an image to represent the talk that can be used for publicity (copyright must allow this)
• Locate a USB headset to use during the webinar. Otherwise, use a landline phone. Using just your computer mic and speakers, cellphones, or speaker phones create echoing/feedback which makes it hard for the audience to understand you.
• One to four poll questions to ask the audience at any time during the webinar.

Timeline

• ASAP: set a time for the webinar and its sound check session. Your host should contact you about this.
• At least one week prior: hold a sound check session. This is an audio check as well as your chance to practice the webinar software and ask staff your questions about giving a webinar. The sound check session is required--it saves lots of time and stress on the day of the webinar to know that you can connect properly and that you sound audible.
• No later than 3 days before the webinar: Send your PBG contact your powerpoint file (see below for guidelines and tips) as well as any poll questions. Send a copy to your host.
• Day of: show up 30 min early to the webinar room for last minute questions, practicing, and set up.

How our Webinars are Structured

Our webinars are typically scheduled for 1 hour. We usually schedule them to occur at 11 am PT, 12 noon MT, 1 pm CT, 2 pm ET. The following is a schedule we typically follow, based on our experiences; however this may be adjusted to accommodate the number of presenters and your needs.

• 30 minutes before the webinar starts. Join the webinar early to ensure audio, etc. are set.
• 5 minutes: Welcome. A staff member or guest host will start the webinar and recording, introduce the webinar (mention any funders and/or related events/webinars), discuss how participants can interact, and introduce the speakers.
• 40-45 minutes: Your Presentation. The host should have the powerpoint on his/her computer, but will give the mouse control over to you so you can advance your slides and use the mouse as a pointer.
• 3 minutes: Any quick poll questions you would like to ask.
• 10-15 minutes: Question and Answer Session. During this period, participants will type their questions into the question box that only the organizers can see. These questions can optionally be seen by the presenter. The host facilitates the Q & A session, screening questions and asking them to the presenter/s.
• 3-5 minutes: Wrap up. We end the webinar by having the host thank the presenter/s and viewers for attending, referring to pertinent resources as well as the website. Participants are also asked to complete an end-of-session evaluation typically sent the day after the live broadcast

Practice Session--What You Will Need

When the webinar was set up, you received an email saying you are a panelist. Use the link in that email to join both the sound check session AND for the webinar itself. A reminder email will be sent to you 1 day and again 1 hour before the actual webinar, but not prior to the sound check session.

A computer USB headset is ideal for speaking on a webinar--it produces the best sound. If you don't have one, you can call in using a landline telephone--cordless phones and cell phones generally do not work well, nor does talking into the computer without a headset. The phone number and pin number will be given in the email you receive that says you are a panelist in the webinar.

Let the organizer know if it is OK with you if we upload a pdf handout of the slides prior to the webinar. We will not do this without your permission.

Tips for Creating Powerpoint Presentations for Webinars

• Keep it simple! Avoid jargon and acronyms without explaining them.
• Minimize the number of detailed tables or spreadsheets -- these can be hard for viewers to read.
• Webinars can be boring! Include pictures to make the presentation more colorful and lively.
• If possible, reduce large images to a more web friendly format (no larger than 600 x 600 pixels).
• Font size should not be smaller than 20pt font.
• No (or very few) animations, no embedded video, please!! These do not work well with a webinar format. If you would like to show a very short video, we can do that, but not in the PowerPoint itself. Video and audio quality of videos shown during webinars is generally not good, so it would be best to avoid videos unless essential for showing how to do something!
• Try to have the essential information in the first half of the slides.
• Not too many slides--the presentation is only 45 minutes long, so more than 50 slides is probably too many!
• Include links to further resources, your website, and your contact information if you wish to share it.

What Happens after the Webinar?

Following the webinar, staff compile any quick poll data and administer a follow-up evaluation (these are available upon request), as well as render the webinar recording to a video format. We post the webinar recordings to the eXtension.org website. All archived webinars are listed at http://www.extension.org/pages/60426. The videos are hosted at PBG’s YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/user/plantbreedgenomics.