Local School Uses Zoho Webinar During Covid-19 Lockdown

During the lockdown period we saw a surge in demand for a Zoho's collaboration and communications apps, mainly Zoho Meeting/Zoho Webinar.

A case study we thought was extremely interesting was that that we set up for a local elementary school using Zoho Webinar.

As my own kids were forced to stay home back in March 2020 I thought of ways to try to help the school to continue some form of teaching and found them very receptive to the idea of providing online webinars to the students on a daily basis.

We set up Zoho Webinar for them as part of a gratis project and within a very short time frame all of the teachers had become experts in presenting webinars online, which is no mean feat! 

If you've ever had to to conduct webinars online you will know that they do require a certain amount of know-how not only of the software but also of how people learn and listen during a webinar session, not to mention young kids!

One of the the aspects we found particularly interesting and relevant to a case study was the security element of Zoho Webinar vs the popular free conferencing apps, which are not necessarily all that secure.

Being a school, obviously the teachers had to treat student confidentiality and privacy as the primary concern.

The registration process in Zoho Webinar is such that attendees can register first for the event and the registrant list can be monitored by the presenter. Suspicious registrant's can be blocked from attending the webinar. As can older siblings who who enjoyed registering with joke email addresses!

During the webinar it was important to be able to protect the student's privacy and deny the teacher visibility into the students home. As webinar software is typically designed as a tool to present on a 'one-to-many' basis the teachers (as the presenters) were not able to see into the students homes but rather were the only ones on the camera at any one time - students could see them but not the other way around.

Also when presenting a webinar it is important for the presenter to be able to control the audience. This is even more applicable when the audience is under 12 years of age! Zoho Webinar has a standard 'hands up' function whereby the attendees are all muted by default and if they wish to get the attention of the teacher they can click a button to raise their hand. (Some might say they wish this was the case in the school too!)

All communication between the attendees and the teacher was done by the inbuilt chat module, which meant the teacher was easily able to control the flow of comments and only discuss those that were relevant to the lesson. The attendees in other words are completely isolated from one another, cannot communicate in any way with other attendees, and do not even know who else is attending.

The registration page can be publicised using a link or even embedded in a school website.

The automated follow up emails that get sent by Zoho Webinar act as useful reminders, so the teacher doesn't have to worry about manually reminding people as they get sent automatically by the software just prior to the webinar and the reminder settings can be configured easily.

Within the space of a couple of weeks we noticed how excellent the teachers had become a presenting online, using all manner of innovative methods from the standard presentations, to screen sharing of drawings, 'jackanory' book reading, playing of videos and music, and even drama classes and quizzes.

My daughter absolutely loves the webinars and asks us to leave the room each time so she can get physical and dance around with her drama teacher!

Within a few weeks the school admin had increased the webinar license to allow up to 100 attendees at a time.

See our Tips for Giving an Effective Webinar.