Webinars are online seminars or workshops that enable live interaction between speakers and participants to interact in real-time through audio and video conferencing. These online seminars can be used for different purposes, such as education, training, marketing, or networking. From a scientific perspective, webinars can be used to showcase your publications, and this brings many benefits to authors and researchers. In this regard, this article tries to thoroughly discuss the advantages of using webinars to present authors’ publications and explain possible challenges.
Advantages of presenting your publications online
Authors and researchers can use webinars to present their publications online, such as journal papers, books, or reports. Showcasing their publications online via webinars may offer several benefits as follow:
Reach broader and more diverse audiences.
Authors and researchers can reach a more significant and diverse audience than in a physical or face-to-face seminar or conference by showcasing their publications via webinars. Through webinars, researchers can reach people who may not have access to their publications due to geographical, financial, or institutional hindrances. Such online events can help them to promote their citation counts, downloads, and Altmetrics and increase awareness and interest in their topic and discipline.
Interacting with your audiences
Presenting online authors’ publications via webinars helps them engage with their audiences more interactively and dynamically than you would in conventional presentations. They can utilize various features and tools like polls, quizzes, chat, questions, and answers, or breakout rooms to encourage and stimulate their audiences. They can also get real-time audience feedback and questions and respond accordingly. The other beneficial thing they can do is record their webinars and share them with your audiences for future reference or follow-up.
Save time, cost, and resources.
The third benefit of presenting publications via webinars is saving time, money, and resources that authors would otherwise spend on travel, accommodation, registration fees, or other expenses related to participating in a physical conference or seminar. It is specifically beneficial when researchers want to avoid the trouble of dealing with visa issues, flight delays, or jet lag. Through webinars, authors or researchers can pick the time, platform, and place that suits them best to present online.
Improving your reputation and network
The fourth benefit of showcasing publications through webinars, academics can promote their reputation and network as researchers. They can demonstrate their expertise, skills, and leadership in their field and gain recognition from other researchers, editors, reviewers, funders, etc. They can also broaden their network and collaborate with other researchers who have similar interests or perspectives. They can join or create communities of practice around their research topic or discipline.
Challenges webinars may face
However, presenting through a webinar may pose challenges; so, it requires some skills and strategies to make sure effective communication and engagement. Some of these challenges are as follows:
Technical issues
One of the main challenges of online presenting is the possibility of technical issues that may influence the quality or delivery of researchers’ presentations. For instance, they may face problems with the internet connection, audio or video quality, software or platform compatibility, or file format or size. These problems may cause delays, interruptions, or disruption in speakers’ presentations and frustrate or annoy their audiences. They may also influence the present’s confidence and performance. To get rid of such problems, the presenter should test their technology in advance of their presentations and make sure that it works properly and correctly. Having a backup plan in case of technical issues or failures would also be beneficial. The speaker also has to inform their audiences about the technical requirements and expectations for participating in the webinar and provide them with support or assistance if needed.
Lack of engagement and interaction
The second possible challenge of showcasing online is the lack of direct interaction with participants. In online webinars, the presenters may not be able to see the audience’s faces, hear their voices, have eye contact, or read their body language. They cannot gauge participants’ interest, attention, or understanding of their presentation. Lack of eye contact and physical interaction makes building rapport, trust, and engagement with the attendance difficult. In addition, receiving feedback or question from them may become complicated. To overcome such problems, the presenter has to utilize different features and tools, including polls, quizzes, chat, question, and answer, or breakout rooms to engage and motivate the participants. To engage and interact with attendance more, the presenter must use effective voice techniques like tone, pace and speed, pauses, and stress, to convey emotion, emphasis, and clarity. Effective body language techniques such as eye contact, showing emotions on their face, and gestures are also essential to convey confidence, interest, and enthusiasm. Paying attention to and reacting to the audience’s reactions and comments during and after the presentation is beneficial.
Distractions
the third possible challenge when one presents their publication online through webinars is the occurrence of distractions that may influence their concentration of focus as a speaker or as an attendance member. The source of distraction may be anything, such as noises or movements in the presenter’s surroundings by notifications or messages on their device or by other tasks or responsibilities they have to involve. On the contrary, the audiences may be distracted by similar circumstances that reduce their attention or interest during the webinar.
A quiet and comfortable place is essential to present online as it helps to avoid or minimize any possible noises and disturbances. Another possible way to eliminate any distractions is to turn off any devices or applications unrelated to the presentation and ask the audience to do the same. To make the presentation more appealing and concise and avoid audience distractions due to lack of interest, the presenter should use interactive methods such as questions, polls, etc., to keep their participants focused and engaged.
competition
presenters may face a challenge regarding competition when they want to present online their publications via webinars. This challenge occurs when there exist other online presenters or sources of information. This means that the audiences have many alternatives to select from when participating in or watching online webinars on similar topics or fields.
They may also have access to other sources of information that may offer them more details or insight than your webinar. To avoid such a challenge, the presenter should ensure that their webinar is relevant, novel, original, and exciting and can be prominent in its field r topic. To have this, the presenter should perform deep research on their topic and discipline and find possible gaps, challenges, or opportunities that their publication addresses.
It would also be benedictional to have a clear and concise message summarizing the online presentation’s main point. Having a clear and competitive title that captures the attention and interest of audiences and utilizing effective visual techniques such as slides, images, or graphs to convey information, evidence, and examples are also quite beneficial to overcome competing challenges
Final words
Presenting your publications online via webinars would be a beneficial and rewarding experience for you as a researcher since it can assist you in sharing your research findings, increase your visibility and influence, and connect with your peers and potential collaborators. However, presenting via webinars also has advantages and challenges and needs some skills and strategies to make sure of effective communication and engagement. By utilizing the tips discussed in this article, you can prepare and deliver successful online presentations via webinars.