The Webinar Blog

SlidesClicker Lets Presenters Advance Your Slides

Three and a half years ago I wrote a blog post bemoaning the fact that I couldn’t get presenters to modify their speaking habits when asking me to display their next slide.

Three years later, someone named Sam submitted a comment on that post. He said co-presenters can control slides remotely and never again have to say “Next slide please.” All you have to do is use something available at www.slidesclicker.com.

Sure, pal. I’ve had people try to advertise their stuff in thinly veiled comments before. I usually don’t pay it much mind. But recently I decided to go ahead and take a look. Damn it… The thing actually works! Almost exactly as I want it to! For a reasonable price!

Let’s review the use case scenario. We’ll say I’m using Zoom or GoToWebinar or another screen-share based web conferencing platform. I lead off as moderator with a few introductory slides. Then another presenter takes over. Maybe there is yet another speaker. Today I did a webinar with four panelists each presenting their section of the presentation, then handing back to me again to moderate Q&A and close out the session. That’s five people and six handoffs of slide control. Trust me, you do NOT want to mess with swapping screen share to each person in turn. They show the wrong screen, don’t start at the right slide, have a different aspect ratio on their monitor, or just introduce an unavoidable interruption in the smooth flow of information as they check whether we can see their screen after the handoff.

So instead, I show the entire presentation for everyone, advancing the slides for them. The audience hears a boring repetition of “Next slide, next slide, next slide.” And Lord help you if the PowerPoint is fancy and has builds or animation effects that need to be clicked at the right time.

Enter SlidesClicker… As host, I install it as a desktop app on my computer (Windows or Mac). I open my PowerPoint (or Keynote, Google Slides, Prezi, Libre, Visme, vMix, Zoho, Canva…) in slide show mode. I open the SlidesClicker app and see a screen giving me a Meeting ID:

I can copy the link and email it to my presenters or I can invite them through the app:

Each invited presenter gets a simple link that opens in their web browser. No install needed. It can run on a desktop or smartphone (people love it on their phone):

They tap the green box and the slide moves forward on my computer. They tap the red box and it moves backwards. Simplicity itself.

“But,” I hear you cry, “If they all have control, don’t they end up all hitting the controls at once, causing chaos?”

Aha! SlidesClicker thought of that. As host, I can enable and disable functionality for each presenter:

So I can let each person control the slides only when they are speaking.

SlidesClicker also built in an option to help prevent accidental double-clicks. When they tap a button, there is a one-second delay before they can tap again. This auto-delay can be turned off if you want presenters to be able to rapidly click through a bunch of slides (for instance, during Q&A to return to a previously mentioned slide).

If you are a GoToWebinar power user, you might be unimpressed at the moment. “GoToWebinar lets me give remote panelists control of my screen right inside the software!” SlidesClicker is far preferable for two reasons:
1) The ONLY control that remote presenters have on your computer is limited to advancing/regressing slides. They can’t drive your mouse and randomly click around your desktop.

2) SlidesClicker doesn’t care where your mouse focus is. You can be merrily typing away in a Chat window, answering an email, or playing solitaire while SlidesClicker feeds the slide advance commands to the presentation software.

There are a few other features that are thrown in with the higher cost subscription option, such as an optional countdown timer to let a presenter know how much time they have left in their section. Or a way to send text messages through the app. The one I’m really keen on seeing is a promised “Coming Soon” feature that is supposed to let the remote presenter see slide notes in PowerPoint or Keynote on their display.

But honestly, this is a gift from heaven for me as a moderator working with many different remote presenters. I bought the “Premium” license that includes the enable/disable presenter control and countdown timer. That costs $56/year. If you don’t care about those features, you can get down to a basic rate of $33/year.

Enthusiastically recommended.

 

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Zoom Hack - Showing A Panelist Without Webcam

This is a rather niche concern, but I was pleased with my off-the-cuff solution to a client problem and thought I would share…

The scenario was a public webinar given on Zoom Webinar. Attendees off-camera and muted; panelists on-camera in a round table discussion format. Also a couple of us working behind the scenes to manage introductions and deal with audience questions.

Shortly before go-time, one of the panelists informed us that she was having a bad reaction to her COVID vaccine and looked/felt terrible. She was willing to still be on the webinar, but didn’t want to be on camera. Could we accommodate that?

OBVIOUS SOLUTION #1: Just turn off her camera. The organizer was hoping to avoid this, because it would look inconsistent… Three panelists on video and one disembodied voice who can be forgotten when she isn’t talking.

OBVIOUS SOLUTION #2: Make sure she has a profile picture loaded in Zoom and enable the option to Show Non-Video Participants. It would show her picture and her name in a square in the grid view. The problem is that it would also show us worker-bees who are supposed to be hidden behind the scenes. Not perfect.

Before I tell you my alternate solution, would you like to pause and think about how you would get around both issues so we could see a picture of her along with her fellow panelists while keeping the assistants hidden?

…

WORKING SOLUTION: Have her upload her headshot as a virtual background image in Zoom. Cover her webcam lens and turn on the camera, selecting the uploaded virtual background. With a black camera image, all you see is the virtual background… In this case, her headshot appearing alongside her fellow panelists.

 

Technorati Tags: Zoom,Zoom webinars,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conferencing,web conference,web collaboration,online collaboration,web meeting,online meeting,video conferencing

Webinar Case Study - A Year of Pathology Training (Part 3 of 3)

• 1 Year
• 75 Webinars
• 39,894 Live logins
• 130,871 Recording views

PART 3: SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION AND COMMUNITY BUILDING

The CAP helped to foster a sense of global community by building strong tie-ins between the Virtual Lecture Series and Twitter. In the days leading up to the first lecture, there wasn’t time to create and distribute traditional promotional campaigns. Twitter was one of the primary ways that pathologists found out about the program, and the CAP quickly created a formal hashtag that people could use to share comments, ask questions, and get help from peers and experts.

Many attendees took screen shots and live-tweeted significant learnings during lectures, which helped extend the reach of the series and brought new registrants. I learned a marvelous phrase that is prevalent in the medical community… “Pearls and Pitfalls.” This is a great way to encapsulate key learning points gained by positive or negative experience and pass them on to others.

INSIGHT – LOOK FOR WAYS TO CALL OUT ISOLATED PEARLS AND PITFALLS IN YOUR SUBJECT AREA THAT CAN BE TWEETED AND REPEATED TO SPREAD THE VALUE OF YOUR EXPERTISE AND OFFERINGS.

Given the subject area, most of the visual materials were inoffensive microscope pictures of cells. But every so often we would visit an area of pathology dealing with external imagery important to the profession. For example, forensic pathology looking at corpses, or pediatric dermatological abnormalities. Doctors wouldn’t think twice about such things, but to my eye as an outsider they stood out as potentially disturbing. I recommended adding disclaimers and reminders for our audience of doctors during these specialty topics that Twitter is a public forum and that retweeting such images could violate usage standards and potentially get people banned.

INSIGHT – THINK BEYOND THE IMMEDIATE REACH OF YOUR LIVE WEBINAR AND TAKE PRECAUTIONS AGAINST OUT-OF-CONTEXT MISUSE OR MISINTERPRETATION OF CONTROVERSIAL MATERIAL.

The CAP found that their social reach grew rapidly from the impact of the webinars and Twitter. Even though that social platform may seem like old news to many of us, there are still people for whom it is unexplored territory. The CAP decided to hold a special “Twitter Workshop” as a supplement to the usual pathology lectures. It covered everything from the basics of how to set up a new Twitter account to how to use hashtags and follow others. We had hundreds of attendees and as participants practiced tweeting and others in the pathology community joined in to welcome them, our hashtag actually trended for a short time as a leading topic on Twitter overall!

One of our experienced lecturers had never used Twitter but decided to set up a Twitter account before his talk so people could ask additional questions and make comments. He received 1000 followers in the next 24 hours and it had a carryover effect on increasing readership and citations of his published research.

INSIGHT – LOOK FOR WAYS TO INTEGRATE WEBINARS WITH OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA AND COMMUNITY FORUMS TO BENEFIT ALL PARTICIPANTS.

If you go back to the statistics at the top of this article, you’ll see that the total views of recorded lectures is more than three times the number of live attendees we received over the course of the year. That is a common occurrence with material that has lasting value and is properly promoted. The CAP continues to get views on those lectures and they provide an ongoing benefit in the perception of the organization as providing value for its members and its professional community. We used the built-in GoToStage portal site that GoToWebinar offers account holders as a single one-stop location for people to find all past lectures. This made it easy to give a consistent and unvarying URL for anyone seeking the materials.

INSIGHT – MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR WEBINARS TO KEEP PROVIDING VALUE IN THE LONG RUN. PLAN YOUR RECORDING ACCESS STRATEGY AND MAKE IT A PROMINENT AND PROMOTED OFFERING.

The College of American Pathologists really hit a home run with this Virtual Lecture Series. One of my contacts there told me that it demonstrated that they could be more agile than they ever thought possible by leveraging the flexibility and reach of virtual communications. The webinar series helped increase new membership in the organization, but went even farther than that direct benefit. Studies conducted during the year showed that the program was a driver in improving the perception of value offered by the CAP.

I want to close with one final insight that I noticed as an outsider in listening to all these lectures. The pathology community is universally explicit and outspoken in recognizing the support, mentorship, and contributions of others. I don’t think a single lecture went by without the speaker talking about a doctor who they studied under, or a piece of research they had found valuable, or a colleague who had provided assistance. It’s a lovely way to keep the spirit of professional collaboration and cooperation alive as a pillar of the industry. So in that same vein, I’m going to mention just a few of the many people I worked with at the CAP in the course of this lecture series. I can’t possibly mention every lecturer by name, and these won’t mean anything to you. But they mean something to me and to more than 130,000 viewers who benefitted from their hard work. Thank you to:

• Christina Arnold
• Michael Arnold
• Adam Booth
• Teresa Burgin
• Ashley Holloman
• Kim Kruger
• Denise Mack
• Barbarajean Magnani
• Kamran Mirza
• The CAP creative, digital, and promotions teams

And thank you to the global community of pathologists working hard to enable and advance healthcare and patient outcomes around the world.

If you missed either of the previous installments, you can click to read PART 1 or PART 2.

 

Technorati Tags: CAP,College of American Pathologists,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration,online collaboration,online seminar

Webinar Case Study - A Year of Pathology Training (Part 2 of 3)

• 1 Year
• 75 Webinars
• 39,894 Live logins
• 130,871 Recording views

PART 2: OPERATIONAL AND TECHNICAL ISSUES

We started off using the CAP’s existing GoToWebinar account. It was already in place and made rapid setup possible. By the second lecture, we had a problem… We had maxed out the default 1000 person attendance capacity for interactive webinars under that plan. People had been blocked from attending. That wouldn’t normally be a big problem. GoToWebinar allows you to set up webinars in “webcast mode,” allowing up to 3000 attendees. There were minor tradeoffs (a buffered audio/video stream meant less use of instant back-and-forth interactions with attendees, and people lost the ability to call in and listen by phone as an audio option). We could live with those issues.

But it turns out that you can’t change the mode of an already scheduled series. Remember that we wanted a single registration to let people attend any lecture on any day. We had around 3000 people registered already. And there was no way to keep them in the system. I had to schedule a new series under a new title. Then we had to reach out to everyone and ask them to register again under the new link and to receive a new login link for the remaining daily lectures. As you might imagine, there were a few days of confusion as people attempted to login under the old link.

INSIGHT – PLAN FOR SUCCESS. IF YOU THINK YOU MIGHT GET ANYWHERE CLOSE TO A CAPACITY LIMIT, STRUCTURE YOUR SETUP ACCORDINGLY. AND VENDORS – YOUR CUSTOMERS WILL ALWAYS WANT TO CHANGE OPTIONS IN MIDSTREAM. WORK ON DEVELOPING WAYS TO MAKE THAT POSSIBLE.

These daily webinars were happening so fast that in most cases there was no lead time for a prep and familiarization session with the guest lecturer. Instead, we would just log in 30 minutes in advance of the go-live time and go over the essentials in private mode. On one of the early webinars, the guest lecturer accidentally clicked the button to take us live to the audience before the start time. I rolled with it and did a little interactive chatter with the early attendees. This quickly turned into a popular part of the daily routine. It even spawned a segment known as “Coffee With Ken” with its own Twitter hashtag! Sometimes I used an interactive poll to stimulate the conversation and sometimes I just used the Q&A facility to read what the early attendees wrote in. Sometimes I shared a picture of something in my life. I picked a new leading question or topic each day (online “conversation starters” websites were a great resource). The only criteria was to keep it light and fun and not connected with pathology.

One of the program stakeholders told me that this pre-show lighthearted segment was rated as a valuable part of the lecture series. “At a time when everyone was scared, and seeing medical crises on a daily basis, and didn’t know what would happen next, it was 15 minutes of hanging out with friends and building a sense of social engagement and community.”

INSIGHT – COMMUNITY BUILDING CAN BE A STRONG BENEFIT OF WEBINARS. LOOK FOR WAYS TO “BE HUMAN” AND SHARE THE JOY OF BEING TOGETHER TO SUPPLEMENT THE VALUE OF YOUR FORMAL SUBJECT MATTER.

Most of the visuals in our lectures consisted of microscopic images of cells taken from pathology slide studies. The lecturer needed to rapidly point at a small feature of a cell wall or nucleus and then shift attention to something else in the image. This led me to a shocking discovery that I highlighted in a blog post last year… Your Windows cursor is a lie.

Even though you can change the size, color, and shape of your mouse cursor on your screen, only you can see the altered cursor. The default small white arrow is passed to screen sharing and screen capture programs. This meant that lecturers with high resolution monitors always showed a tiny cursor that could be very hard for attendees to see. The only way to get around this was to use the built-in highlighting tools in GoToWebinar, but we found that the presenter had to turn off the highlighter to advance the slide, then turn it on again. Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you try running a lecture with 200 slides being shown in rapid succession, trying to quickly highlight one small thing on each slide.

INSIGHT – IF A PARTICULAR TYPE OF VISUAL INTERACTION IS CRITICAL IN YOUR WEBINAR, TEST THE HECK OUT OF IT AHEAD OF TIME. TEST HOW THE AUDIENCE SEES THE CURSOR, THE ANIMATION, THE HIGHLIGHT, THE ANNOTATION. AND KNOW HOW IT AFFECTS YOUR FLOW OF OPERATIONS.

Late in the program, the CAP tested a platform switch, moving from GoToWebinar to GoToWebcast, which they relied on for certain other educational offerings. Even though the technology names are similar and are offered by the same vendor, they are quite different in behavior. We discovered that our account was not provisioned to allow screen sharing, which meant that lecturers needed to provide me with their locked-down PowerPoint presentation a day in advance so I could upload it for display. It reduced flexibility and agility, and meant that lecturers could not show live digital microscope images if desired. We ended up going back to GoToWebinar as the technology platform that worked best for this particular series.

INSIGHT – EVERY WEBINAR PLATFORM HAS STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES. SOMETIMES YOU CAN’T TELL WHAT WORKS BEST FOR YOUR NEEDS UNTIL YOU TRY IT.

In PART 3, I’ll examine how the CAP integrated social media to expand its effectiveness.

 

Technorati Tags: CAP,College of American Pathologists,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration,online seminar,online collaboration

Webinar Case Study - A Year of Pathology Training (Part 1 of 3)

• 1 Year
• 75 Webinars
• 39,894 Live logins
• 130,871 Recording views

PART I: BACKGROUND AND PROJECT INITIATION

Over the last year, I have had the privilege of assisting the College of American Pathologists with a tremendously successful webinar series. They were kind enough to let me write about it here with some observations and insights from my viewpoint as technical administrator and moderator.

Last March, as COVID-19 isolation and work-from-home policies rapidly went into effect around the world, pathology trainees who would normally receive supervised training, case work, and practical experience in hospitals, clinics, or practices suddenly found themselves at home with fewer opportunities to enhance their knowledge. The College of American Pathologists (CAP) recognized that as the largest member society for pathologists, they were in a unique position to provide education for members of the profession in the earlier part of their careers.

The CAP thought they might be able to offer a few training lectures designed specifically for pathology residents, presented by experienced faculty. They decided to call the offering a Virtual Lecture Series. The initial thought was that they would offer a lecture each workday in April, focusing on different specialty areas of pathology study and practice. Pathology residents would register once and be able to attend any of the lecture subjects that caught their eye.

I got an email on Thursday, March 26th, asking if I had time for a brief phone call to talk about the practicality of this tentative idea, which hadn’t yet been approved by management. The following Wednesday (April 1) we held our first lecture – four working days later! 1818 people had registered and 879 actually attended.

INSIGHT – YOU CAN GO FROM CONCEPT TO PRODUCTION IN A REMARKABLY SHORT TIME IF YOU HAVE AN IDENTIFIED AUDIENCE WITH A SHARED NEED AND AN EXISTING COMMUNICATION NETWORK. NOT EVERY WEBINAR NEEDS A TWO-MONTH MARKETING CAMPAIGN.

In a heartening show of solidarity and service to their profession, dozens of experienced and noted pathology specialists readily agreed to present lectures online without asking for payment or reimbursement for their time. Most had presentations already available in their files from past lectures or materials they had planned to present at conferences that were suddenly cancelled, so they were able to quickly suggest topics and brush up their content to join the roster with very little lead time.

INSIGHT – DON’T OVERLOOK THE BENEFIT OF BRINGING EXISTING PRESENTATIONS TO A WIDER AUDIENCE. NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE NEW AND UNSEEN.

The CAP thought that they were likely to get some interest from pathology residents in the USA who wanted a way to fill the gaps on normal training opportunities they were missing during lockdown. Maybe word of mouth would slowly spread and attendance might grow over time.

Instead, they were surprised to find instant, strong demand from listeners around the world. People attended the lectures at the most inconvenient local times from dozens of countries on almost every continent. We also saw attendance from pathologists working in practice, well out of their residencies. Doctors loved the ability to get refreshers on specialty topics from some of the top practitioners in their field and to join in the larger spirit of community learning.

INSIGHT – THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A LOCAL WEBINAR. CONSIDER HOW YOU WILL ACCOMMODATE GLOBAL INTEREST AND AUDIENCES INCLUDING PEOPLE YOU HADN’T EXPECTED.

In PART 2, I’ll examine operational and technical issues we encountered.

 

Technorati Tags: CAP,College of American Pathologists,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration,online seminar,online collaboration