When creating a Webinar you need to be aware that it is critical to keep your audience engaged if your goal is for them to retain the information you provide. Engagement must be often and relevant. Relevant simply means something related to what you are teaching. It should build on your audiences’ background knowledge on the subject. Research shows time and time again that relating content to background knowledge increases retention, so why shouldn’t your engagement pieces do the same?

From my experience as a Webinar Virtual Assistant, the typical Webinar is 60-90 minutes. In a 90 minute window of time you should chunk our content into 20 minute sections making sure to engage learners every 8 minutes or so. Simple, right? Let’s take a deeper look:

• 90 Minute Block – In general, whether we provide online training, teach a class, or anything else that involves holding a groups attention we should be sure to provide a break at least every 90 minutes. This has been the case time and time again. How do you think they came up with 90 minutes being the optimal time for block scheduling in some schools? I can assure you it wasn’t by accident
• 20 Minute Chunks - You must break your content up into chunks. No one can hold attention for 90 minutes straight. 20 minutes has been shown to be the optimal amount of time during classroom instruction to go over any section of content. Online instruction is not much different.
• Engage every 8 Minutes – This is just a general rule of course, but it does have some research to back it up. Did you know that by the time most students graduate high school they have spent more time in front of a television than in a classroom? What happens about every 8 minutes when you are watching TV? If you guessed a commercial break you would be correct. So imagine how tough it is for some of us to hold attention for extended periods of time without some type of break in the action. This is where the engagement piece comes in. It doesn’t have to be complicated, in fact it can be as easy as having everyone take a stretch break while a quick audio/video clip plays. I would recommend putting a bit more thought into it than that however. For example, in some Webinars we create a scenario for participants to respond to. This allows them to quickly apply the knowledge they’ve learned while adding engagement to your training.

Hopefully this quick and easy strategy will help you design some of your lessons to be more engaging for your participants. If you happen upon this post and try it, I would love to see comments about how you made it work in your Webinars.

Best,

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