The Centre for Distance Education is extremely thrilled to announce a new offering for our students: webinar lectures and one-on-one real-time tutorial assistance.

Short for “Web-based seminar”, a webinar is a web-transmitted presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted. The best part about a Webinar is its interactive elements – the exchange of information and the ability to discuss it – and it’s all live.

At CD-ED and DArTT, we’ll be incorporating webinars to help introduce students to the world of online education, to deliver certain topics that require instructor input, to troubleshoot individual problems, to bring the students closer together into a classroom-like setting, and to assist in our goal of making our learning programs as accessible as possible for people with different learning abilities.

 

The software we’ll be using will allow us to offer the following:

• » Slide presentations to illustrate a specific concept or technique;
• » Live video of a lecture by an instructor;
• » Live audio from your instructor explaining a concept, answering questions, or narrating the presentation;
• » Recording to allow an archive of topics to build up over time for future students;
• » A whiteboard to allow the instructor or students to mark on a slide or a blank board to illustrate design concepts, point out errors, circle a troubling area, or just make notes;
• » Text chat to allow for live question and answer sessions;
• » Polls and surveys to allow impromptu knowledge tests, or simply gather opinions;
• » Desktop or application sharing, where participants can view anything the presenter currently has shown on their screen – and vice versa.

This last option – desktop sharing – is an electrifying option once you start to think about it. Students will be able to watch the instructor demonstrate the technique just as though everyone was in the same room – and they’ll be able to interact with the instructor and each other.

When a student has an individual problem, the instructor can institute a one-on-one webinar session and can watch the student’s screen in order to help define what might be going wrong and how to fix it.

Better still, our webinar software allows for remote desktop control, which means if necessary the instructor can take control of the student’s machine (with permission) and show that student the correct technique on the student’s own desktop.

Internal instructor tests are taking place through next week, and the students will start seeing invitations to webinars in their email inboxes to begin the week of March 24th.

This is a very exciting move for CD-ED and DArTT, and our instructors are alight with the possibilities for helping their students.   

Click to view a demonstration video of what can be accomplished with webinars.