Podcast 41: Are you all zoomed out?
Welcome to a Question of Gamification. I'm An Coppens the show host for the show and today's question is one of mine.
Are you all zoomed out?
Yes. I mean the Zoom online meeting system or in fact, any online webinar, meeting or conferencing tool.
In this lockdown, and thankfully for many of us, we are coming to the end of the lockdown. Or at least the end of remote working for some of you. For organizations like ours that have been remote from the start, we'll continue to do what you have been doing for the last number of weeks. As in work remotely and we probably see many more companies doing this.
What I see is there's an awful lot of debate on how great it is that more things are moving online and how great it is. I champion that. I would be the first to say, yes, I think it's good that we are exploring all opportunities and all ways of communicating, I am definitely all for it.
One-way traffic or Talking heads syndrome
What I also increasingly see, and this is what I feel a bit more opinionated about, because of our gamification work where we try to encourage engagement, and this is the talking heads syndrome. I think in most of the meetings that I've been in online, whether they were conferences, learning events, et cetera, the trend is towards more talking heads, video heads.
People talking at you with very limited interaction. In fact, in some online conferences, they are even going so far as saying, please do not post questions on the sidebar whilst people are speaking. Or the other example where they are at least trying I guess, where there is a sidebar in the software, where you do get encouraged to ask questions but then nobody answers anything and you are left with to nothing, no interaction or no questions answered.
The people that are actually speaking rather than just ramble on about whatever hobby horse topic, they are on. Some of them are very informational. Don't get me wrong. But it's very much an information one-way street and very little about the two-way interactive experience that most learners need for them to make sense out of information.
The side or backchannel matters
I'm also part of other networks where I actually feel, you can have a great sideshow going whilst still listening to the speaker. I think that is more true to reality. In most situations, if you're training in the classroom, primarily, you'll always have side chat, side conversations and sometimes these side conversations will make the mainstream. Sometimes they don't. I think that's natural.
So for people to be asked to shut these natural responses down, I think is going against human nature. What is worse and more likely to happen is that they will join each other on Slack and start slagging each other off, or the speaker off or worse again, tune out altogether and leave the meeting or conference run in the background. I have definitely done that on a lot of online events and conferences in recent months.
Making your online meeting or conference more interactive?
What can you do to make your Zoom or whichever webinar tool that you use more interactive?
The first thing is to actually look for questions and to engage people, to comment on specific topics. You can include polls. Most of the webinar or online meeting software, these days have polls as a functionality, where you can get like a temperature check. As a rough guide, I would say every five to 10 minutes, you should schedule in some activity in order to keep people engaged, whether that is a Q and A, whether that is a quiz, whether that is a poll, whether that is a question what are your thoughts.
Ideally, go further and get people to work together on something. People work together in the real world.
I would go even further than that and set them a challenge where they can break out into breakout rooms, work on it together, and then have per group feedback very much like you would do in a, in a seminar setting.
Are you all zoomed out?
Yes. I mean the Zoom online meeting system or in fact, any online webinar, meeting or conferencing tool.
In this lockdown, and thankfully for many of us, we are coming to the end of the lockdown. Or at least the end of remote working for some of you. For organizations like ours that have been remote from the start, we'll continue to do what you have been doing for the last number of weeks. As in work remotely and we probably see many more companies doing this.
What I see is there's an awful lot of debate on how great it is that more things are moving online and how great it is. I champion that. I would be the first to say, yes, I think it's good that we are exploring all opportunities and all ways of communicating, I am definitely all for it.
One-way traffic or Talking heads syndrome
What I also increasingly see, and this is what I feel a bit more opinionated about, because of our gamification work where we try to encourage engagement, and this is the talking heads syndrome. I think in most of the meetings that I've been in online, whether they were conferences, learning events, et cetera, the trend is towards more talking heads, video heads.
People talking at you with very limited interaction. In fact, in some online conferences, they are even going so far as saying, please do not post questions on the sidebar whilst people are speaking. Or the other example where they are at least trying I guess, where there is a sidebar in the software, where you do get encouraged to ask questions but then nobody answers anything and you are left with to nothing, no interaction or no questions answered.
The people that are actually speaking rather than just ramble on about whatever hobby horse topic, they are on. Some of them are very informational. Don't get me wrong. But it's very much an information one-way street and very little about the two-way interactive experience that most learners need for them to make sense out of information.
The side or backchannel matters
I'm also part of other networks where I actually feel, you can have a great sideshow going whilst still listening to the speaker. I think that is more true to reality. In most situations, if you're training in the classroom, primarily, you'll always have side chat, side conversations and sometimes these side conversations will make the mainstream. Sometimes they don't. I think that's natural.
So for people to be asked to shut these natural responses down, I think is going against human nature. What is worse and more likely to happen is that they will join each other on Slack and start slagging each other off, or the speaker off or worse again, tune out altogether and leave the meeting or conference run in the background. I have definitely done that on a lot of online events and conferences in recent months.
Making your online meeting or conference more interactive?
What can you do to make your Zoom or whichever webinar tool that you use more interactive?
The first thing is to actually look for questions and to engage people, to comment on specific topics. You can include polls. Most of the webinar or online meeting software, these days have polls as a functionality, where you can get like a temperature check. As a rough guide, I would say every five to 10 minutes, you should schedule in some activity in order to keep people engaged, whether that is a Q and A, whether that is a quiz, whether that is a poll, whether that is a question what are your thoughts.
Ideally, go further and get people to work together on something. People work together in the real world.
I would go even further than that and set them a challenge where they can break out into breakout rooms, work on it together, and then have per group feedback very much like you would do in a, in a seminar setting.
The podcast Gamification Nation Podcast is embedded on this page from an open RSS feed. All files, descriptions, artwork and other metadata from the RSS-feed is the property of the podcast owner and not affiliated with or validated by Podplay.