Saturday, June 2, 2012

Have everybody interacting at lectures

By Dr. Eduardo Mayorga
(I have no financial interest in any of the products mentioned below)

In past blogs we talked about making face-to-face lectures interactive with answering response systems. We also talked about the interactivity that webinar software allows when giving online lectures.

Residents training takes place every day, all over the world. A lot of teacher effort is used to teach small groups of residents in their own hospitals. Today technology allows to share face-to face teaching with online attendants and make them interact. It is possible to blend both and have attendants in the room interact with online attendants, sharing responses from both groups on screen. 

We have tried and tested different  webinar software such as GoToWebinar, Blackboard, Webex and Adobe Connect. All of them have in common excellent features and may fit different needs. At this time the one we are using most is  Adobe Connect and the description below refers to it.

In the screenshot that follows you can see how attendants in the room and online can see on the screen the results of the responses from residents in the room (top right) and residents connected online (bottom right)



Attendants in the room require an answering system such as "Turning Point", unless they have mobile devices to answer through the webinar software. When using Adobe Connect you will need the computer holding the answering system to be also promoted as "Host". If you would like more detail on how to set this up you may contact us at educators@icoph.org