Learning Management Systems play an important role in the eLearning field. Different educational institutions use LMS software to manage their learning spaces. And if you want to transform your online learning platform into a complete education environment with live video sessions in your virtual classrooms, you will need to integrate it with the webinar software. In this article, we are going to show you why you need this integration, how it will help you in your teaching work and provide you some recommendations.
What are online webinars?
The term “webinar” comes from the two words “web” and “seminar”. A webinar is a form of an online conference. It is an engaging online event that is held in a way of the video session, where a speaker delivers a presentation to an audience, which can participate in the session by submitting questions and using other interactive tools.
Webinars provide great opportunities for learning. They can be live and recorded beforehand, so they can be delivered to the audience at a specific time. You can add a Q&A session to your online meeting, which is usually found very helpful by most people.
Webinars are great for different purposes and different niches. But they’re just incredible for online education and schools and universities in particular.
So let’s take a look at webinars’ real usefulness in the eLearning process.
How do webinars work for e-learning?
It is hard to come up with a tool or idea that would be more helpful and suited for delivering information online than webinars. Webinars are usually perceived as virtual classrooms. By using live video sessions, instructors can take their daily academic routine to a higher level and deliver knowledge worldwide.
For students it looks like a virtual lecture room that they can access with the help of a video-conferencing application. Learners simply gather up to participate in their virtual lectures and listen to the presentation performed by the instructor. Apart from that, teachers can upload some slides or additional video content to make the session more interactive. And thanks to the Screen sharing tool, students can walk through a complex topic, following a step-by-step live tutorial.
In addition to this, we would like to mention one important factor. Teaching with the help of webinars provides an incredible opportunity for students with disabilities to receive the desired knowledge helping them to study at home in suitable conditions.
How you can communicate with students?
Many believe that webinars are one-way communication tools. We want to break this stereotype. Communication with students can be practiced in different ways, and there is more than one:
- Live Chat and Q&A mode where learners are allowed to send their questions and get instant responses.
- Conduct Polls and Surveys to engage students and evaluate their knowledge.
- Enable feedback that students can submit after the event.
All in all, webinars serve to create the connection between you and your audience, thus to support your communication while distancing interaction. With the help of it, you can deliver and transmit the information in different ways. And this makes learning a lot more engaging and effective, which is more important. This makes it possible to create interactive cooperation with the course participants during the lectures.
What you can practically achieve with webinars:
- Reaching out to a large number of people at once. Live streams do not limit you on scales. Involve as many participants as you want. There is always a second option, you can pre-record your webinar and broadcast it to a bigger audience.
- Host meetings from everywhere. This is the biggest advantage of webinars — accessibility. Share information with people on a global scale, from anywhere you are.
- Webinars are cost-effective. There is no need to spend resources on traveling or purchasing expensive hi-tech equipment.
- Efficiency and high performance. Students can take part in webinars from comfort places like their home. Learners can take in the information from the comfort of their own home. This can help with absorbing and retaining the information, as long as learners feel safe and relaxed.
- Webinar tools are usually very easy to use, there is no need for you to utilize complex software.
Webinars are very flexible and give instructors more freedom in presenting the learning material and delivering it to students.
Possible Challenges To Be Aware Of
However, you must consider that there could be challenges when it comes to conducting a good webinar.
Technical challenges. This is the most common problem you should be aware of. Most often people face audio and video issues due to bad internet connectivity. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always depend on us, and fixing it could be out of our capabilities. But if you know that might happen, you can prepare yourself and optimize the performance.
You should remember that online lectures are not the same as they are in a classroom environment. Despite the fact, webinars give us the flexibility and real-time experience, you need to adapt learning techniques first, considering some of the limitations.
Why do you need to integrate webinars to LMS?
The objective of any integration is to reduce the duplication of work and automate some of the processes that can be time-consuming and require manual assistance. To do this you can synchronize data from one system to the other. In our case, we are talking about integrating video conferencing technologies into LMS.
Such integration with web conferencing will benefit your teaching practice by adding a social aspect to the learning. According to different studies and reports, synchronous eLearning engages students and helps them retain the information collected. What is more, by using video tools integrated you can easily schedule and manage meetings and webinars directly from your LMS.
Implementation of webinar tools you will have much more benefits including:
- Reduced costs
- Improved teamwork
- Improved social learning experiences
- Removal of geographical limitations
- Possibility to involve professionals to host training
Web conferencing tools widen the functionality of your LMS which learners can use to take part in webinars and web meetings.
In general, the connection of two systems will help you to monitor three important factors: scheduling, registration, attendance reporting.
Scheduling sessions is the step that is completed in the LMS. This ensures you do not have any scheduling conflicts, while you are using your LMS to set it up once. Registration or enrollment of participants is held by LMS as well and doesn’t require you to do any additional work. Attendance reporting can be tracked down in the webinar tool and passed back to the LMS.
How webinars and their integration will improve courses?
If you already run an eLearning platform and tried to use webinars, you understand that integration can make it much easier to manage online lectures directly from your LMS.
What exactly you can do by interconnecting these two systems:
- Manage easily and save time when scheduling a session from one platform. Without integration, you need to go and set up each service separately. This increases the amount of work you have to do, plus, multiplies the chances of errors by learners. Directly from your LMS create the webinar session and specify all the details.
- Notify students about session planning. It is important to notify your learners that they have a webinar to attend. And this you can do with the LMS. As you can see two of these tools are perfectly supplementing each other.
- Record data in one system. It is not very convenient when your students are enrolled in the webinar through your LMS, but the attendance is in the third party conference system. This is time-consuming and manual work for you to manage. And an integration will automate the process.
- Easy to set up. We are not talking about any exact services, yet the majority of webinars tools can be simply integrated in LMS. A variety of plugins and extensions available for you to effortlessly implement video conferencing in the learning systems.
Zoom + MasterStudy LMS
For those who are looking for a practical solution, we found it. Integration of two amazing services — Zoom and MasterStudy LMS.
Let’s have a look at the Zoom service. Zoom is one of the leading video communication tools in the world. This powerful software helps to bring people closer no matter where they are. Today people use Zoom for multiple purposes. It is equally great for personal objectives, professional plans and of course for online education. The service includes a variety of tools such as meetings and chat, phone systems, video webinars, workspaces.
In 2020, Zoom is experiencing rapid growth caused by increased demand for switching to distance learning. Zoom Meetings bring students closer to a teacher. With Zoom LMS integration you will have a face-to-face connection with the learning team, wherever you want.
Zoom integration will take your learning programs to the next level, as it provides a rich experience for all of those who are involved in the process. It creates a perfect environment in which instructors and students can collaborate effectively.
And if you have ever thought about delivering the lecture or conference directly from your LMS, then MasterStudy and Zoom are exactly what you need. The combination of both services enables you to create an environment where Zoom and MasterStudy work together to bring the best experience to you and your students.
This is an amazing opportunity to add interactivity to your content. MasterStudy LMS is a very flexible education tool, which with the help of an additional plugin – eRoom – Zoom Meetings & Webinar allows you to integrate webinars into your LMS just in a few minutes. Simply install the plugin and create meetings directly from your dashboard.
In these meetings, not only the attendees can see or hear each other, but also the flow of content between them becomes possible. Delivery of presentations, sharing of documents, demonstration of application interfaces, controlling of desktop or passing control to other presenters
As a result, you get a fully controlled integrated system allowing you to reduce the admin work, access the web conference setting directly from your dashboard panel and deliver knowledge in a more engaging way.
Take eLearning to the next level!
Online education is not optional anymore. And many of the educational institutions are implementing online techniques. Coordinating eLearning activities from LMS is a great method, but you can achieve more impressive results with webinars included in it. As you will be able to meet your students in virtual classes and teach them more efficiently.
FURTHER READING