Using QR codes for interactive engagement in live webinars

QR Codes has been used widely as a way for people to quickly interact mainly with websites.  As everyone in the Educational Sector is moving to online delivery of lectures QR Codes may provide the interactivity that is required to keep the students engaged.

We have used a wide variety of Webinar platforms for instance Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams Meeting and to Microsoft Live Events to deliver online lectures at the SLIIT Faculty of Computing.  We have embedded planned Quizes, online Activities and Q&A during these online lectures.

Zoom has a built in polling feature, but most of the other webinar platforms do not have a built in polling or a quiz feature.  We have used tools such as Slido, Socrative, freeonlinesurveys.com and repl.it for interactivity.  All these tools have support for mobile friendly web interfaces.  We were able to get participants to go to specific interactive content with ease using QR Codes 

The first QR Code  is a link to Slido, the second to a sample program in repl.it.  The third is a quiz running in freeonlinesurveys.com and the final one is a Google Forms Survey.

We can effectively use QR Codes in any situation where a mobile phone can be used to provide interaction.  One advantage is that the student can continue to be attentive to the webinar that is being conducted without moving onto a separate screen in the browser to complete the interactive activity.

Dr. Nuwan Kodagoda