Ten Tips for eClassLive Moderators
As the moderator of Live sessions, you play a key role in ensuring all your participants have a great experience, one that facilitates engagement, discussion, interaction, and collaboration. Here are our top ten tips for being a highly effective moderator!
1. Practice, Practice, Practice
You can create as many practice eClassLive sessions as you need through your moodle course. Fine-tune your moderator skills by practicing with two computers side-by-side or with a friend, colleague, or family member. Be sure to check out the free recorded training sessions on the Elluminate website, where you can brush up on using moderator tools in just a few minutes.
You can also contact CTL Tech Services to set up an eClassLive training session which will give you experience as a participant, so you can learn how to be a better moderator.
2. Facilitate Student Orientation to the Technology
To ensure that your students have a great first experience with the eClassLive technology, make sure they have the resources they need to configure their computers prior your session. First direct your students to prepare for sessions by visiting our eClassLive system setup page and Participant FAQ page.
They can also visit the Elluminate Participant training website where they can view a five-minute participant orientation recording and download a quick reference guide.
In addition, at the beginning of each session you moderate, it is good practice to provide a slide that explains how to configure audio and create a user profile.
3. Engage Participants
Experts say that there should be interaction every 6 minutes, so start off with an ice breaker, such as displaying a map on the whiteboard and having each participant indicate where they are located.
You can plan your presentation to have interactive breaks after each segment. You can ask questions that require students to raise their hands, click an emoticon, respond with a green check or red X, type in the chat window, or even type or draw on the whiteboard. Encourage students to think and respond. If your material or teaching strategy permits, you can promote participants to moderators, and let them deliver presentations or lead the class.
4. Check Frequently for Understanding
Use instant polling, and publish the results to stimulate discussion. Plan activities using the whiteboard and breakout rooms where all students participate. Have each group from a breakout exercise present the results of their work. Use application or desktop sharing to have participants demonstrate what you’ve been teaching.
5. Prepare Content Ahead of Time
Create presentation slides and instructor notes, and include multimedia or application sharing to help reinforce content. Don’t just expect interaction to happen, design it into your lesson plan. Your instructor notes should include what you want to say and do on each screen. Your notes also include suggested questions to promote discussion and interaction.
Elluminate has a companion tool called Plan that may help with this if you are running extremely complex sessions. It enables you to organize, script, and package content and activities BEFORE your real-time, online session. Contact CTL for more information about Elluminate Plan.
6. Have a ‘Producer’ in Your Session
You may find it helpful to recruit another instructor or student helper to manage technical support questions or troubleshoot problems. It’s also helpful to have someone manage questions and comments in the live chat area. Your helper can organize questions for you to answer later or address comments as they come, as well as list pertinent information, like a support phone number, instructor email address, important web link, or other resource.
7. Smile and Your Participants Will Smile With You
Be positive and energetic, and your students will catch your enthusiasm. Your voice is critical to setting the tone. Some moderators even stand up and walk around a bit during a session. Consider using your webcam to introduce yourself at the beginning of a session. And be sure to have a user profile with photo and contact information for participants to view. Encourage them to create their own profiles as well.
8. Record the Session
eClassLive interactive recordings are almost like being there and are a great way to build reusable learning content. Your notes should include a reminder to start the recording at the beginning of every session. Provide the recording to students so that they can review the content, especially if they missed a session. You can even add indices during the live session to mark key sections in the recording. Consider creating additional recordings as tutorials to supplement your live sessions.
If you want to go one step further, Elluminate offers a compnaion program called Publish that can convert recorded sessions into reusable, offline multimedia objects. If you have recordings that you want to preserve for a while this may be an option for you. Contact CTL for more information about Elluminate Publish.
9. Run the Audio Wizard as Soon as You Join Your Session
Running the audio wizard before each session ensures your audio is working and the levels are correct, even if you just left a session. And have your participants do the same. You can even include instructions to do so on your session welcome slide.
10. Join Early
Get in the habit of joining your sessions early. It starts things off right when you greet participants as they join. It will also give you ample time to load content, set up breakout rooms, and test your webcam and video. Turn off your phone, and consider putting up a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.