For teachers — organizing Zoom webinars 101 with Q&A

A step-by-step guide to running an interactive online event on Zoom

A quick start guide to get your online event up and running

Why webinars?

You can host an interactive online event on a range of different platforms. However, we opted for Zoom for three main reasons:

• Control over who speaks — Everyone is muted by default and can only speak if you grant them permission, compared to a zoom call where you might have unwanted interruptions by individuals.
• Privacy — Speakers cannot directly interact with a particular member of the audience (unlike in a Zoom call). Only host and panellists can share their screens and videos.
• Paywall (Paypal integration) — If you need/ want to charge a registration fee for your event through Paypal, then you will need a Zoom Webinar License.

One drawback, however, is that Zoom is not free. Pricing starts from $40USD/month (for 100 attendees) so do check if your school administrator possesses an active subscription!

You can read more about the distinction between Zoom webinar and meetings here.

Planning your first online event can be understandably daunting given the sheer amount of other responsibilities you have to manage as a teacher. This guide is written with that in mind so you can jump to the sections you need:

1. Glossary of terms
2. Buying a webinar plan
3. Scheduling your webinar (even recurring ones)
4. Setup: Inviting speakers as panelists and deciding permissions, automating triggers for survey forms
5. Hosting a Practice Session
6. Registration
7. Recording
8. Q&A Options
9. Taking a photo with participants
10. Feedback/ Survey

1. Glossary of terms

• Host: The individual with all the privileges and is the one who organises the webinar (only 1)
• Co-host: Like above, but can be multiple co-hosts
• Panelists: Individuals you invite to speak at your event

2. Buying a webinar plan

If you don’t have a Zoom account, you can sign up here.

If you have a Zoom account, clicking this link should bring you to your zoom account. Otherwise, after signing in, you can go the Billing tab, add Video Webinar to your cart and complete the checkout process.

Click on this link to get to the screenshot above

3. Scheduling your webinar (even recurring ones)

To get started, click on the Webinars Tab (left navigation bar) and then click on the Schedule a webinar button

Fill up the details as needed. If you want your participants to register for your event through a Zoom registration form, do check registration as required

If this is a recurring webinar, e.g. a regular lecture that you conduct, be sure to check that box too (right below Time Zone).

If you find yourself prone to forgetting to record the session, you can check automatically record a webinar as well!

You are done with the first steps! People can register for your events and now you just need to add your speakers.

4. Setup

After creating the webinar, you should be brought to this screen where you can invite speakers as panellists, decide permissions and automate triggers for survey forms.

Under the Invite Panelists section, click edit

5. Hosting a Practice Session

You will need to enable ‘practice session’ for this to take place. This feature is helpful if your speakers are not familiar with Zoom controls.

6. Registration

You can use a native Zoom registration function or just use the online forms you are familiar with (Google Form, Typeform or any online survey). This however obliges you to add a notification/ reminder system for participants.

Based on CareerContact’s experience, the attendance rate is about 30% for online events including reminders. When absent, the drop-off rate will be even higher.

If you want to save yourself the hassle of triggering automatic reminders for participants, you may decide to use the native Zoom registration function — detailed support can be found in the Zoom Help Centre)

Perhaps the main thing to note about using the Zoom registration function is distinguishing the level of approval — namely, automatic or manual approval.

Finding the written tutorial difficult to follow? This video guide by the Zoom team will walk you through the entire process:

7. Recording (during session)

In case you did not configure automatic recording during the setup of your webinar, fret not, you can record on the fly.

You can choose to record on the Cloud or on your local computer. Since the latter takes up storage on your hard disk, do check that you have enough space (typically 1–2GB should be safe for a 1–2hr long webinar).

8. Q&A Options

As you schedule your webinar, you might have checked the Q&A option. The native Zoom Q&A tab gives you the following options:

The options you get for the Zoom Q&A function

I’ve found that allowing anonymous questions increases participation rates. You can also allow attendees to:

[ ] 1 Upvote questions

[ ] 2 Comment on questions

[ ] 3 See all questions

[ ] 4 See only answered questions

Choosing option 4 denies all other options. To allow for moderation to take place, option 4 is probably the best so you or your moderator can pick and feature questions instead.

If you do not like what Zoom provides, you can also consider the following:

A. Pigeonhole — simple Q&A tool with upvoting and moderation tools, mostly user friendly

A. Mentimeter — always a crowd-pleaser. You will need to set up an account separately if you don’t already have one. This is a preferred option if you need visualizations like charts, graphs, word or even emoji clouds to better capture audience responses over and beyond basic Q&A.

From Menti themselves — live word clouds explanation; spider charts, pie charts and of course the standard bar charts are richer offerings that menti provide.

For detailed guides on how to manage Q&A during a webinar, you can check the following links: on desktop — same for Mac and Windows; on mobile — iOS, Android

9. Taking a photo with participants

Participants cannot be seen by default so as a host, you have to promote them to be a panellist in order to let them be seen.

To do this, you need to:

1. Click on Participants in the webinar controls, it is this human icon:

2. Click on the Attendees tab and manually click each student to “promote to panelist”.

Images courtesy of Zoom support under the section managing attendees and panelists in a webinar

Note: This is where having a co-host is super helpful. They can help promote your students to panellists quickly to get the shot, allowing you to end the webinar promptly.

I know this is tedious but there isn’t a better solution at the moment. Still, beats having no photo of the event, right?

10. Feedback/ Survey

Getting feedback for the event typically involves sharing a QR code during screen share (which can be done using tools such as QR code generator.com or an iPhone Shortcut). However, this may not be enough to get the desired response rates.

Enter Automatic Triggers — even if your participants leave the event midway, the post-attendee URL can be triggered upon exit of the webinar which should help to bump up your Feedback form completion rates.

You can set this to trigger under the Branding tab:

Change the Post Attendee URL to our Feedback Form URL. This ensures that upon ending of the webinar, the feedback form automatically triggers!

Feel free to leave a comment if you need any help. All the best with planning your online event :)

Cheers,

A fellow educator

Part of the series Tech Tips for Teachers (T3), the CareerContact team writes through consultation with existing educators in order to support their digitisation efforts and enhance teaching and learning. We share our own expertise with remote work and virtual events management and are open to collaborating with schools to support career exposure initiatives as well as digital skills training for staff. CareerContact has run over 20 webinars for over 1800 students across Singapore and Southeast Asia.