Doing collaborative Lectures with a resource Panel of Lecturers in Microsoft Teams Live

The current global pandemic has created an unprecedented  situation which has caused major disruptions in life arguably after the 2nd World War.  Every sector including the Educational Sector had to innovate to keep business as usual. One of the major challenges in the shift to online education, is keeping student attention during live webinars.  Getting Students attention has been a major difficulty even in face to face classes. The problem escalates when we have more students in a typical university setting.

Interactive techniques like live polling, doing interactive work, using breakouts for group work are ways which are known to enhance student engagement.  In delivering an undergraduate freshers course on programming and software engineering, we tried to use a novel approach of making use of a resource panel to deliver live webinars.  This involved planning well in advance to ensure a smooth delivery during the webinar.  This article describes the approach we used to conduct an online lecture making use of a set of academics to represent a resource panel.

The idea that a group of resource panel might be able achieve better student retention during an online live  lecture was based on the experience the resource panel had in observing how panel discussions are conducted during live conferences.  The resource panel were part of lecture panel that delivered an undergraduate freshers course on Object Oriented Concepts.  Essentially this course is a mixture of software engineering concepts and programming.  We have over 2,000 students taking this course this semester at SLIIT Faculty of Computing and in typical face to face classes we would take a maximum of 240 students in a classroom.  

Since we decided to use Microsoft Teams Live Events we needed to factor considerations of using that platform as well.

We had other support staff to manage the Microsoft Teams Live Events.

Composition of the Resource Team

1. Resource Panel - 3 academics
2. Moderator - 1 academic who would ask questions
3. Microsoft Teams Live Events - Producer - 1 academic
4. Handling Q&A - 1 academic

The key take aways of doing a successful collaborative live webinars are as follows.

1. Getting to know the tools that you are using really well.  We used Microsoft Teams Live Events, Slido and freeOnlineSurvey.com    You cannot experiment during a live webinar, to do a great live webinar requires a good knowledge of the tools at your disposal.  We spent several days experimenting with specially Microsoft Teams Live Events as it was a new tool for everyone.  By the time we went live, we were pretty confident that we would not have any surprises during the session.
2. Planning the delivery.  We prepared a detail script on who would take what section.  Essentially the material we took was a lecture that was traditional done by one academic. We broke the lecture into sections allowing each resource person to take a logical section.
3. Embedding interactivity.  We planned to embed Quizes, and interactive activities to the lecture.  The quizzes were prepared in advance in freeOnlineSurvey.com and the interactive activities included answering questions to submitting programming code.  We used Slido for Q&A and later for some of the webinars we also used Microsoft Teams own Q&A tool.  For programming we used the collaborative online programming editor repl.it.  In both cases (programming and answering questions) students submitted their answers to the Q&A platforms provided.  In addition they were encouraged to ask any other questions they had.
4. Communicating during the Webinar.  This was a key element to ensure that everything went smoothly.  We setup a WhatsApp group to communicate.  This helped us to adjust on the fly as the situation demanded, resulting in a seamless delivery during the live webinar.
5. Planning out carefully who shares the screen.  Although multiple resource personal could share their screen, we opted for one individual to control the screen.  We recognise that for most teams it would be better for the individual resource person to share their own screen.  The only thing you need to do if this approach is used is to ensure smooth transfer between the sharing of screen.  The producer should be in sync of what is happening.
6. The final point obviously is a given, you need to know the content in and out. This was not a problem for us as we have been delivering this course for over three years.

During the live delivery we had the moderator leading the session asking the resource panel the various questions that leads to them describing the relevant content.

Close to 84% of the students claimed that this specific delivery method increased their interest in the course.  A majority surveyed found this method of delivery was a better approach and said that they had higher retention rates even when the delivery was close to 2 hours.

The lecture content of the webinar was close to 1 hour, the rest of the periods were for various student activities.  The time for embedded student activities varied from half an hour to one our depending on the nature of the lecture we conducted.

Dr. Nuwan Kodagoda