What I learnt as a panelist on my first academic webinar
by Piyush Mathur
Not unlike many others with a background in higher education, I received an invitation recently from a global research institute to participate in one of its webinars. As an unaffiliated researcher, I was happy to receive an institutional invitation; but the backdrop of COVID-19 had made it even more uplifting for me. For when I received the invitation, on April 10, I had already been trapped inside my humble abode for over a fortnight—thanks to the pandemic—and I had little hope of seeing, for real, the social world of fellow humans anytime soon. Moreover, even though I had been inserting myself, off and on, into the social media traffic, I had nevertheless been feeling left out from the world of constructive engagement and sustained communication on themes of broader import. The unexpected invitation to the webinar was thus kind of like an unbirthday present: I felt as if a gift had fallen into my lap when I had least expected it.
And a gift it was—given what it would end up teaching me in short order. Minutes after accepting the invitation I was contacted by the institute’s director (who was a complete stranger to me), and we had a video chat on Gmail. During that impromptu chat—in which I participated lying on my back in bed—he introduced me to a webinar hosting software called WebinarJam; walked me online through a couple of its basic features; checked its compatibility with my operating system; and had me have a brief trial run on it with him. Through this trial run he wondered if I had noticed a humming noise in the background (which I had all but missed in those hurried moments)—and suggested that it would go away if I used headphones. I told him that I had no headphones—but I did have earphones somewhere in my bag, and that I would make sure that I don’t forget them on the day of the webinar.
The topic of the webinar was Perspectives on Post-Coronavirus Global Politics; however, in the chat, he stressed with me to focus on India—and implied that the other two participants would focus on their respective countries, China and Kenya. Based upon the webinar’s title, I had been thinking that its panelists would share their views on post-pandemic global politics rather than on the politics each of his own country. Nevertheless, I reconciled to the discrepancy between the title and the focus that was being assigned to me by telling myself this: Maybe the idea is to have the three presenters bring to the table their country-specific perspectives that would altogether generate a globalistic profile of post-pandemic politics, possibly via the helping hand of the moderator (a Turkish academic, I would come to discover later via an Internet search by his name). That was an ad hoc explanation that I had given to myself—but it allowed me to be a teamplayer from the get-go!
So there I was—with all of 19 days in hand before my first-ever webinar; entirely excited about having been discovered by this institute in a country I had never visited (and having discovered this institute, in turn); and a bit anxious about the dependability of the Internet in my own country, especially given my personal lack of a landline—and what with the lockdown. But I also had other academic work to do in this short span of time—and I had also begun to feel a bit sick thanks to some quick changes in the weather.
When I caught a moment to focus on what and how I might present my own part—within a 20-minute slot that had been assigned to me—I found myself pretty lost and worried. The pandemic was (and even continues to be) a landscape of fast shifting sands (going in all different directions, too). Even experts and expert groups that have been researching the virus itself have been correcting and contradicting one another on all sorts of claims. We still don’t know who Patient Zero was; which animal transmitted this virus to Patient Zero; precisely where and how Patient Zero was infected; and of course we have neither a clear cure nor a vaccine (and nor is there any guarantee that we may develop a vaccine). Against this backdrop of agonising uncertainty and plain ignorance, I was supposed to wax eloquent on a few additional layers of uncertainty—packed up in this string of outrageously open-ended words: Post-Coronavirus Global Politics.
Struggling with all that, I looked up the profiles of the other panelists on the Internet in the next few days—partly to reduce the overall factor of uncertainty relating to the webinar, partly to size myself up to their unique intellectual talents. I also wondered about the exact format of the event—and sent a couple of emails to the organiser about it. I had also been beginning to forget how the virtual platform operated, whether I would need to register (and if so, when), etc.
Unfortunately, I never received a response to my interim queries—and it was only 2 hours in advance of the event that the organiser-cum-institute director—contacted me via Facebook to make sure that I was going to be at the event. At that time, I was busy making my printouts; removing any minuscule cobwebs from the ceiling lest they ruin the view on the camera; and testing out different spots and angles from where my visage would hold up the brightest for the viewer!
When the event started, the moderator announced, after a few systemic hiccups, the names and brief credentials of the 3 panelists. However, the other two did not show up immediately; so he had to ask me to start out with my presentation. But I was not exactly ready to be the first one (given that the photo lineup on the webinar page had me in the middle)—something that got aggravated by the fact that, instead of being asked to present my writeup, I was asked a question by the moderator and was supposed to respond to it. And that question was directly about my perspective on “post-Coronavirus global politics” rather than on how India, per se, had been handling the situation and how that might affect its post-pandemic politics!
So, as off-balance as I already was—and fogged up by my cold, afflicted with a troubled throat—I was momentarily lost between spouting off my improvised patchwork of a presentation on India (through the pandemic and beyond) and pulling off an impromptu reflection on the future of global politics (in the wake of the pandemic). Those short moments of being conflicted at the start are nothing nice in front of a live camera—and they could go far across one’s self-presentation.
As to how the rest of the event moved ahead, I would save the reader the details—except to say that as far as my own performance was concerned, there was full many a slip between the cup and the lip! Other than that, the very end of the event seemed rushed. And the researcher from Kenya never showed up—but none of us would know that until after the event: so, we all sort of kept waiting for him, even though nobody had an opportunity to ask about it. In any case, his absence had taken some riches out of the event.
Well, by the end of the webinar I was a sorely disappointed man: disappointed mainly in the quality and character of my own contributions, and slightly in the way it had gone forward as an event. Since there was nobody around me to discuss all that, and nor could have I stepped out of my apartment for a walk owing to the lockdown, I discussed it online with an offshore friend who had watched it. Soon after that, I ended up making a Facebook call to the organiser—who did make me feel better about my own presentation (partly by placing the event itself within the overall context of our coming to terms with webinars).
After around 4 days, when the dust had settled, I dared to see the video recording of the event—and in fact came out with a bit more positive view of it. In this revisit I was not distracted by my expectation of seeing all the three presenters—nor by an erstwhile prospect of how the Kenyan’s sudden appearance in the middle of the event might affect our extended time slots. And of course I was already acutely aware of almost all the negatives of my presentation (and, so, there were no great surprises to be encountered).
In the meantime I had also given a thought to how such events could generically be better grasped by researchers like me ahead of their own early acts of participation in them—as also to how these events could be better managed. I also figured that the best way to convert my negative feelings regarding my own experience into something positive and constructive was to convey publicly how I had experienced it and what I had learnt from it.
Ergo, I put together a tentative list of quick pointers that might help other researchers as well as organisers in preparing (for) their upcoming webinars—as also in retrospective self-assessments of their prior webinar performances. That list is presented below: The first six of its pointers are directed at webinar participants (including moderators, and sometimes even audience); the last one is directed at webinar organisers.
PRESENTING AT AND ORGANISING ACADEMIC WEBINARS: 7 TAKEAWAYS1. A webinar is not simply an online version of a conventional academic seminar.
While conventional academic seminars have themselves always been quite variegated—ranging anywhere from precise deliveries of newly discovered facts and associated analyses in nature research to frequently meandering, convoluted diatribes in socio-humanistic research—their format has also been evolving fast. More and more of our academic seminars have been getting video-recorded, with the purpose of being put online; others have been getting live telecast online. The richer and/or the more market-driven the institution, the greater the stress in it on video-recording all manner of things—most of all public (as different from in-class) seminars. These exercises make an institution look technologically savvy; they also help it market itself far and wide. Moreover, many academics employed at these institutions love the glamour of it all—but they also have not much choice in the matter: aggressive self-marketing is integral to their terms of service there. And then there is also the idealistic argument for free universal access to ideas—which favours academic self-promotion.
Nevertheless, nobody has ever called either these video-recordings of conventional seminars or their live Internet telecasts webinars. That’s for all the good reasons—and they need to be highlighted to help us all better prepare for webinars—by not expecting them to be mere online versions of seminars. Well, these are the key differences between a seminar and a webinar:
a) A seminar allows you to familiarize yourself in advance with your site of performance; more importantly, with your organiser and possibly with some of your prospective audience. Unless a webinar has been organised by those you already know, at a place that you have already visited, you won’t have any prior familiarization with the outward context of your prospective performance: You would know your own workstation, but that’s about it! You would go to your computer screen and webcam “all cold”—and present yourself looking at them, at your own moving image on the screen, and at the moving (sometimes interrupted) images of fellow panelists and the moderator! A webinar thus requires a slightly different mindset than a seminar.
b) In a seminar, even if it is being recorded or telecast live, you would be focused on your immediate audience—and thus on the content of your presentation, for the most part. But in a webinar, you would have no real immediate audience—an audience that you could see (other than the moderator and fellow panelists)—and thus you would be distracted by the factor of live telecast, by the sort of image of yourself that assume you might be projecting (via light and sound on your end, among other matters of aesthetics and social etiquette). All these factors would sap your attention, making you feel that the time is running faster than normal—faster than, say, in a seminar of the exact same length.
c) In a seminar, you are not responsible for your surroundings; in a webinar, you are not only responsible for all of that—but you also feel it (unless you are a completely thick-skinned, aloof creature).
d) In a seminar, your body movements could be a positive part of your communicational wherewithal; in a webinar, as I explain further below, you are best off not moving your body at all—excepting, maybe, your eyes and eyelids, to some extent.
e) Webinars are a human response to a set of circumstantial constraints inasmuch as they are a result of a particular set and level of technological capabilities. As technologically mediated events, they come to us from the realm of virtuality—and they are contingent upon the factor of physical distance among their users (which is what they are supposed to bridge anyway). All in all, webinars retain a combinatorial character of mass-scale telemedia and capital-intensive—technologically saturated—corporatism. Conventional academic researchers—especially those from outside the fields of engineering, finance, journalism, film (possibly theatre), and certain types of nature research—would have to come to terms with webinars as a very different type of beast than what they have been used to; they would have to come to terms with their apparently rushed nature; they would also have to come to terms with its “celebrity” or “power” effects.
This last part might be difficult to pin down (and even more difficult to admit) but it is about how a conventional academic, used to the confines of the classroom, corridors, and seminar halls—and hoping for only a miraculous chance at any kind of media-based celebrity—would constructively handle an opportunity that has all the effects of the contemporary mass media but only a remote (yet very real) chance of going viral (for better or for worse). Moreover, while errors within verbal exchanges among participants at a conventional seminar could be corrected by them on the spot—with the generally unacknowledged help of learned attendees (many of whom one’s own academic fellow travellers)—there is far less chance of that happening at a webinar (since the audience is invisible, remote; and the event is extremely time-bound, by virtue of lacking a particular physical location).
So, if an academic errs in a verbal, informal statement within a webinar, and if nobody challenges the statement via a written message (which is possible to do), then that error might survive in the cyberspace through perpetuity, whereby tormenting the academic. And even if that error is corrected through the flow of the exchange itself, only the erroneous part of the recording could yet be selectively played out on the Internet by the academic’s political adversaries—should there be any. Even if none of the above happens, an academic may yet go to a webinar with the fear that that might happen—and she may thus remain overly self-controlled in her statements (whereby depriving the world of spontaneity and creativity).
f) To the extent that (academic) webinars respond to the circumstantial constraints of their potential participants, they cannot help but generate intellectual products (qua proceedings) that cannot satisfy all the standards of academic presentations at conventional seminars. For instance, unlike a seminar, a webinar is eminently suitable as a way to get quick, near-instantaneous reactions to an emergent challenge or crisis from relevant researchers from around the world; as such, a webinar is closer to a journalistic interview (even though it is not one). Given the above circumstantial features attendant upon a webinar, the entirety of the research community would have to recalibrate its expectations from itself in relation to—and as addressed—by webinars.
2. Do not move around in your chair. Do NOT move your head. Do NOT stare intensely into the camera: but nor should you look away from it!
Yes, I learnt all that the hard way—and mostly in retrospect. No less than 3 minutes into my monologue, I was gently informed by my webinar moderator that he couldn’t hear me because I was moving around too much! It was embarrassing to me when he told me that—since I felt like a child; but when I looked at the recording, I realized that he had basically understated the problem. Watching the recording thus made me feel even more embarrassed and even anguished—at the fact that I had unwittingly perpetrated much pain on the audience. If I were myself an audience, then almost certainly I would have left the alleged talk of this hitherto unknown man (me, that is) whose speech had apparently been rolling off while being mostly inaudible, besides being punctuated by much static disturbance and disturbing physical movements on his part.
But I also noticed in the recording that there were several occasions when I had zoomed myself into the camera—staring intensely into it—and thus giving myself the appearance of a demented soul, maybe a psycho! In reality, I was only trying to pay attention to—or focus on—what the moderator or the other presenter might have been saying (and this was not being easy for me given that I was in the grip of a growing cold). On other occasions, though, I also found myself looking completely sideways, whereby giving the impression to the viewer that I was a nonchalant, inattentive participant.
The lessons that I drew from this aspect of my unsatisfactory performance are these:
Keep your body, face, head absolutely as relaxed and still as possible when the camera is on. Turn off the video and the audio—using the appropriate buttons—when you must move around a little bit.
Do not strain your eyes or eyebrows while trying to focus: In other words, try as hard as possible to make no physical manifestations of otherwise conspicuous attempts at intensifying your mental focus on whatever is being said by others.
Except for super-brief moments, do not show your cheek to the camera: i.e., do not look sideways. If you have to do it, say to pick up your water bottle, then turn off the video and audio first.
3. Technology would play games with you—and you would be the one blindfolded.
I have seen a few recordings of live international webinars other than my own, and I have yet to see one that did not have those static noises, uncomfortable durations of silences, awkward crosstalk, or longish interim moments of a missing presenter! I am sure that immaculate live webinars do exist—and maybe in good quantum, too—but I have not been lucky enough yet to see one.
Webinars, by default, depend on so many types of equipment—located across different geographical sets of infrastructures and service providers—that they have every chance of encountering at least brief glitches or ill-coordinated moves. When a webinar is international in its scope, then those challenges are only magnified. And if you are participating in a webinar locked up in your home (rather than sitting in your institutional office)—for whatever reasons—then you are most likely adding a couple of more layers of challenges to it, unless your domestic infrastructure is already on a par with a commercial-level counterpart. Finally, if you are not habituated to using your equipment for the specific purpose of webinarring, then quite possibly you would face hiccups during the process.
While any of the above systemic aspects might betray you, you won’t necessarily know it in the moment. It would usually require a short or a long hindsight to detect the problem you would have been facing before—and if—you could fix it. Moreover, the connection may be fully restored only a moment or two after you had detected and tried to fix the glitch: So, remain attentive to the screen and the presence of others while trying to address a glitch. (Do not, for example, mumble angrily anytime you are trying to address a connectivity issue.)
Such instances of disconnect are perforce embarrassing—since you feel that everybody else already knows that the fault is on your end. It is thus a good idea to go to a webinar knowing that you (and every other participant) would have such moments, as this would allow you to keep your cool. But it is also a good idea to keep the above in mind as you decide just to watch somebody else’s webinar!
4. Unfortunately, the presenter is also the janitor, the cleaner, and the maintenance staff.
When we go to a seminar, we take so much for granted: clean, technologically equipped, completely functional premises with more than a pair of helping hands right around the corner somewhere! Well, a webinar is quite another story.
Researchers usually do not usually keep their workspaces in complete order; quite the contrary. So, when you, a researcher, are about to face the camera—with several other strangers from around the world tuning in (and many more with the potential to see the webinar video online through eternity)—then you very likely want to project an orderly, clean, professional image of yourself and your workspace. More than the image, your functionality during the webinar itself—and the viewers’ focus of attention—would demand that there is no clutter around you (apart from the requisite technological paraphernalia); that you have a light background; and whatever essentials you may ordinarily need are at a hand’s distance.
Assuming that you are a typical researcher—who is surrounded by plenty of mess—give yourself at least one full day to clean up your act completely before the Big Day, and keep everything you need at the ready on your table but away from your keyboard.
5. Say goodbye to your sense of privacy; get used to your own audiovisual objectification.
Most researchers appearing on webinar panels won’t become well-known by any means; however, none of them should authentically be left with an erstwhile sense of privacy (even though they may continue to enjoy privacy in practical terms). This loss of academic privacy has of course been a slow slide that started in due earnest in the early 1990s—as online profiles of researchers and teachers in technologically advanced countries began to show up on institutional websites—and turned into a veritable tsunami globally in the 2000s, with the explosion of social media. With webinars, though, researchers would be forced to go public as talking, moving images in association with their areas of expertises—and frequently in association with their alleged areas of expertises.
The subjective would thus come publicly fused into the objective for the academic researcher who has otherwise been used to keeping the two realms separate (except within local contexts of his functionality). While some researchers may have secretly been craving just that type of public fusion of their subjective and objective aspects of life and personality, the vast majority of them are simply not used to it. In the unfolding era of webinars, though, it might be a good idea for a researcher to begin to develop for herself an alternative framework for negotiating and perhaps even articulating one’s own sense of self—and even emotional defence mechanisms.
A related issue for an academic would be about how to get used to seeing oneself—potentially over and over again—through the gaze of one’s own camera, albeit inside audiovisual footages that he could no longer control. After all, there were pretty good reasons why an academic did not choose to become a model, a politician, a television reporter, a pole dancer, an actor, or a gamester. Well, that set of reasons for your choice of academic career is not gone by any means; so most of what you can do, as a webinarring academic, is to learn to overlook the standards that apply to those other professions while also learning any of their techniques that might positively augment your research-related self-representation. Above all, though, academics would have to become more comfortable with their audiovisual objectification (not to be confused with sexual objectification, though sometimes even that would play out)—and to learn to see and hear themselves without hating it all!
6. If you are developing an intriguing cold before the event, then it might be worthwhile to cancel your participation.
That might sound comically timid—and it probably is—but what I am trying to suggest is that a prospective presenter at a webinar is liable to underestimate the impact of his sickness on his preparation as well as performance simply because he is already in the comfort of his home. The point is that if you won’t travel from Agra to Delhi for a conference because you feel sick, then why would you participate in a webinar sitting at home? After all, travel itself didn’t require you to be at your qualitative best anyway; it was the academic performance at the conference in Delhi that you probably did not want to ruin.
So, if you are feeling increasingly sickly as the webinar date is approaching, then you might consider cancelling it—unless what you have to present at the webinar is of a critical importance to the world at large (say, if you have successfully tested a vaccine for COVID-19 in your laboratory).
7. If you are the one organising it, then you may want to take the following 4 steps as part of your event management.
Despite their being similar in how they differ from seminars, webinars of course have specific differences among themselves; so I am not mandating the following steps to all prospective webinar organisers. However, if you are planning to organise your first webinar—which was in fact the case with the organiser of my webinar (as he would later reveal to me in our Facebook talk)—then you might want to take any or all of the following steps:
a) While it is a requirement to walk a prospective panelist through the software application once he or she has accepted to present at the webinar, it would also help to send that person a one-page written handout highlighting the key features of the application.
b) Ensure at least one meeting among all the panelists and the moderator ahead of the webinar itself; that they agree to this meeting should be a precondition to their participation in the webinar. This sort of an advance meeting is important as it would not only help each person get familiarized with all the rest, but it would also test the level of their commitment to the event—and their technical preparedness for it, just the same. Moreover, ahead of this meeting, the organiser could convey to the moderator what sort of an event—its character, structure—he or she has generally envisaged; the moderator could use that input in this meeting to prepare the entire group for the webinar.
So, for instance, the moderator could establish the key stages—and the cues to these stages—and convey them to the panelists in this pre-webinar meeting. If (s)he is planning to start out by asking a specific question, then (s)he could even reveal that question in this pre-webinar meeting, etc. That way, the panelists would have a pretty good grasp of the exact format of the webinar—and it should help them perform better in it.
c) Remain in contact—even a bit proactively—with the panelists and the moderator in the days leading up to the webinar; these participants may have specific questions about the event and their own role in it, and you should be there to answer them. Also, it won’t hurt to send a couple of messages just to check if the panelists are moving forward with their preparations or not, if they are doing alright.
d) Just as there should be a pre-webinar event, there should also be a post-webinar event—and I am tempted to suggest—right after the webinar itself is over. In this post-webinar event, all the members of the panel—including the moderator—could informally mingle with one another as well as the organiser (outside the public gaze), howsoever briefly. They could reflect upon the event, discuss their institutional activities, and just be cordial as fellow travellers (despite any disagreements that they may have had during the webinar).
This post-webinar meeting would also be an opportunity for the organiser to present the timetable by when the recording of the webinar would be posted on the institute’s website. In this meeting, the participants might also be offered the option of rectifying, if possible, any errors that they might have made in their statements during the discussion session, in particular. That’s because a live event on camera makes people more susceptible to making statements that might not be entirely exact—and they may want to rectify them based upon what they otherwise know to be correct information.
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External references:
Gallagher, James (April 30, 2020) “Coronavirus cure: When will we have a drug to treat it?” (Downloaded from the following URL on May 9, 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52354520 )
Odishabytes (May 4, 2020) “There May Never Be A COVID-19 Vaccine, Just Like HIV & Dengue, Feel Some Experts” (Downloaded from the following URL on May 9, 2020: https://odishabytes.com/there-may-never-be-a-covid-19-vaccine-just-like-hiv-dengue-feel-some-experts/ )
Sharma, Sanchita (May 8, 2020) “Covid-19 vaccine development sees unparalleled progress” (Downloaded from the following URL on May 9, 2020: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/covid-vaccine-development-sees-unparalleled-progress/story-PtAQIKRHB9omEFWbdUfJKI.html )
United Nations (May 8, 2020) “UN virus hunters continue search for animal link to human COVID-19 infections” UN News (Downloaded from the following URL on May 9, 2020: https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/05/1063552 )
Williams, Philip; Lucia Stein, and Rebecca Armitage (April 23, 2020) “The coronavirus 'patient zero' set off a chain of events which upturned the lives of 7 billion people” (Downloaded from the following URL on May 9, 2020: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-23/how-coronavirus-went-from-patient-zero-to-the-world/12165336 )
Piyush Mathur, Ph. D., is the author of Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017). For his shorter publications, click here. If you wish to contact him, then please click on his name above.