Interactivity in Microsoft Live Events Webinars
Microsoft Teams Live Events is a broadcasting platform that scales upto an audience of 10,000. It is the big brother of all all other Webinar Platforms which includes Microsoft Teams Meeting, Cisco WebEx and Zoom,
The other main plus point this platform has in addition to the numbers is the uninteruppted session that can be conducted.
Downside on using Microsoft Teams Live Events is that larger numbers in the audience and a time lag of 10 to 20 seconds from the live broadcast.
We managed to have highly interactive sessions with upto 800 students using Microsoft Teams Live Events. The key was recognising the delay of upto 20 seconds.
The approach we used was that we would give students an interactive activity which were typically quizzes. This could be something lasting from one to five minutes (See Slide 3 from above image). Instead of discussing the results immediately we would dive into a section and comeback for the discussion of the student answers later (See slide 8 from above image). This ensured that the majority of students had time to attempt the quiz even if they had delays in the broadcast.
We slightly deviated for questions where students had to use the Q&A to answer a direct question we posed. These questions were of a more inquiring nature, which were asked as we teach students new concepts. This was used to generate ideas students had and ensure that their thoughts were in the right track. We used slido and Microsoft Teams Live Events for Q&A in these situations. In these situations we generally we do not expect the entire student cohort to respond to a direct question we ask, so if we get a set of sample answers we would take it as a representative sample. In this case we would wait till we see a few answers come up in the platform that we used and move ahead with the explanation.
We have tried the second approach successfully even in situation where students had to produce a complex artefact such as programming code as a submission during an online delivery using Microsoft Teams Live Events.
The students and our team of academics enjoyed working with Microsoft Teams Live Events. We were able to produce high quality webinars with no interruptions, the recording were of high production quality. The students responded with a satisfaction rate of over 86% in a survey we conducted.
This article appears as a Blog Post in the SLIIT eLearning Research Group Blog by the author.
