3 Tips for Interactive Web Conference Design
Faculty and staff at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) have been using web conferencing software for the delivery of live lectures in online courses and web-based orientation and information sessions for the past three years. As more folks at Penn start using web conferencing tools, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned about best practice in the design and delivery of real-time, online sessions.
1. Design your presentation mindfully; plan interactive moments.
Use the interactive features of your web conferencing software to keep your audience connected to your topic and each other.
- Provide a warm-up activity. Share a map on the whiteboard and have participants identify where they’re located, for example, or have participants play a simple word game, like Hangman. Getting participants to use the interactive features right from the start helps set the “ground rules” for interactivity throughout the session.
- Design moments for guided reflection. In her undergraduate World Music course, Dr. Carol Muller plays unfamiliar music to her students and prompts them to describe in few words their initial response to that music using the direct messaging tool. As the written responses come in, she continues to speak, rephrasing student thoughts using the academic register of her field. Within a few weeks, she notices that students start to use the language of ethnomusicology in their chat sessions.
- Design question and answer sessions into your talk. While Dr. Peter Struck delivers lectures in his Greek and Roman Mythology course, for example, students are encouraged to participate in backchannel conversations with the Teaching Assistant via the chat tool. Every 10-15 minutes, he pauses his lecture, allows the TA to report on what students are commenting on in the chat, and then extends the conversations with the students via the voice and video tools before returning to his lecture.
- Design small group work into your presentation. In Academic Writing and Research Design in the Arts and Sciences, a graduate seminar, Dr. Kris Rabberman uses breakout rooms for close reading and group discussions. In these private spaces, students work with a select number of their peers on an activity aligned with instructional goals. Dr. Rabberman visits each room to provide guidance/feedback. After the group exercise, students then return to the main room to present their findings/conclusions to the larger group.
- Use polls (quizzes) to check for understanding and track participation. You can design these in advance, or create them as you deliver your content. In the LPS information session for online students, for example, we ask how many users have taken an online course before, whether or not they’ve used the web for real-time interaction, and, if so, which tools they’ve used (Skype, Google Talk, etc.). We then use that data to drive our conversations about how online courses work at Penn.
2. Create visuals that enhance your verbal delivery.
- Share your screen with users. Take participants on a web tour or show them how to use online tools. As a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, for example, David Azzolina from Penn Libraries introduces students to key databases and resources available in Penn’s extensive library system.
- Create a whiteboard where participants can work collaboratively. Dr. Kris Rabberman uses the whiteboard to help students identify writing conventions and develop peer editing skills. She uploads samples of text to the whiteboard and asks students to use the marking tools to highlight/circle key issues.
- Pre-load images or include them in your lecture slides. In a lecture describing the history of parliamentary land enclosure in Britain in the eighteenth century for her Introduction to Romanticism course, Myra Lotto includes historic maps and images of a pastoral countryside to convey the mood of that period.
- Use PowerPoint strategically. In Calculus 2, Nakia Rimmer uses animated slides to guide students through solutions to complicated problems. Read Edward Tufte’s work if you want to learn more about the effective use of Power Point and the design of visual information. He’s bringing his one day course on Presenting Data and Information to Philadelphia on March 16, 2010.
3. Control your verbal delivery.
- Speak a little bit slower and a bit more emphatically than you might normally speak in a face-face lecture session.
- Vary the volume, rate and tone of your speech.
- Incorporate pausing to highlight key ideas, transition between points, and/or recapture the audience’s attention.
- Worried about whether or not your participants are following along? Establish techniques for collecting frequent feedback from participants. Have students use the “My Status” tools (shown on the right), for example, to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down, speak louder or softer.
To learn more about effective practice in designing presentations using Adobe Connect Professional, visit:
RIT Online Learning, winner of the New Media Consortium’s 2008 Center of Excellence Award.
Adobe’s Resource Center provides tutorials on features and best practice advice:
- Read through the User Quick Guide or watch a video about how the web conference tool works.
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This information is really very helpful. We use RHUB Web Conferencing (http://rhubcom.com/v4/web_conferencing/home.html) and it allows us to do a lot of personalization.