Here is a Live Online Learning Activity (LOLA) that explores the reasons for boredom in webinars. I use this activity as an opener to focus the participants’ attention on reducing webinar boredom.
Synopsis
Invite the participants to type in chat individual responses to this question: Why are most webinars boring? Ask the participants to predict the top responses to this question from a previous group. Display these responses and discuss each. Invite the participants to individually select a cause for boredom for personal removal from future webinars.
Purpose
To review reasons for boring webinars and discuss how to handle them.
Participants
Minimum: 1
Maximum: Any number
Best: 10 to 20
Time
10 to 20 minutes
Flow
Organize two teams. Tell the participants that if their last name begins with A to M, they belong to the red team. The others, whose last name begin with the letters N to Z, belong to the green team. Ask the participants to figure out the team they belong to.
Ask a question about webinars. Display the question on the screen and read it:
Why are most webinars b-o-r-i-n-g?
Ask everyone to think about the question. Ask the members of the red team to type their response in chat. Tell the members of the green team not to type a response but to review the responses from the red team by scrolling through chat.
Let the participants complete the task. Pause for about 3 minutes while red team members type their responses and green team members review them.
Invite predictions. Tell the participants that a colleague has collected the responses to the same question from a previous group of participants. You have identified the nine most frequent responses from this collection. You are not going to display the list. Instead, you would like all the participants (from both the red and green teams) to type a prediction of the responses among the top seven. Ask the participants to set their chat to send the message only to you (the facilitator) and type two responses as their prediction. Remind the participants that these predictions do not have to be something they typed (or read) earlier.
Score the predictions. Explain that you are going to display the list of seven high-frequency responses from the previous group, one at a time. Instruct the participants to give themselves 1 point if any of the responses matches one of their two predictions. Display the following list, one response at a time, and read the item. Remind the participants to keep their personal scores.
No interaction with the content, among the participants, or between the participants and the facilitator.
The participants respond to questions, but these questions are unrelated the training objectives.
The facilitator merely reads the slides displayed on the screen.
Technical glitches disrupt the session.
The content of the session is boring.
The participants are already familiar with the content presented in the session.
The participants suffer from physical discomfort from sitting still too long.
Identify the top scorers. After reading the nine responses, ask the participants to raise their hands if they scored 2 points. Congratulate them for their psychic ability.
Discuss the causes of boredom. Read the top nine responses again, one at a time. Ask these two questions and invite the participants to discuss them by opening their mics or typing in chat:
Why do the respondents feel that this is a reason for boring webinars?
What could the webinar facilitator do to remove or reduce this reason for boring webinars?
Select a cause to remove. Ask each participant to select one of the nine boredom causes to remove in the next webinar he is planning to conduct. Have them share this choice with others via the mic or in chat.