1. Hand in your material on time

The AO staff provides you with a lot of services to make sure your webinar will be successful. These include a presentation template, reviewing your learning objectives, ensuring the AO brand guidelines are followed, and formatting videos as well as photos correctly. However, you need to be aware that all those services take their time. Therefore, please make sure to hand in all the required material for your webinar as soon as possible keeping in mind the suggested timelines.

2. Ensure your slides are easy to read

Many webinar viewers use small devices (tablets, mobile phones) and/or have bad internet connection. To ensure that they can still view your presentation, divide the information into various slides with big and easily readable fonts. Do not use borders, shadows or animations and avoid tables with tiny font size (you can outline the important parts and let 'participants download the complete presentation after the webinar). Also, do not use too many pictures on one slide and crop the pictures you will be showing to focus only on the essential part.

3. Use multimedia content

A good video or animation is worth a thousand words. If you have multimedia content that fits your presentation, is not too long, and of good quality, it can be highly valuable to emphasize the learning objectives of your webinar. Enrich your presentation with good videos or animations whenever possible.

4. Include only horizontal videos
As mentioned in tip 3, videos are very welcome. Many webinar presenters want to include videos they made themselves with their mobile device. This is not a problem as long as the video is recorded horizontally. Horizontal videos fit well into the reserved space in the presentation template and allow for the video to play in the highest resolution.

6. Involve the audience

Include polling questions in your presentation to ensure interactivity. Three to five questions spread over the whole presentation are ideal. Do not forget, however, that if you include a poll you also have to comment on its result, which might be surprising sometimes. The responses to polling questions can also inform you about the level of expertise of your audience, which in turn allows you to adapt your presentation to your learners' needs.

7. Rehearse your presentation

If you are hosting a webinar you will be moderating for one hour straight. Be aware that a webinar presentation is not the same as a lecture. It includes some parts that you would not mention in a lecture. Therefore, rehearse your presentation and prepare to:

• Say hello and introduce yourself and your chat moderator (short but bold)
• Introduce your presentation, the webinar schedule, and the learning objectives
• Hand over to your chat moderator
• Invite participants to send questions
  
  

8. Speak slowly
In any webinar the presenter tries to give as much information as possible in a short time. Nevertheless, it is important to speak slowly and clearly. Participants from all around the world will join your webinar, including nonnative English speakers as well as viewers with bad internet connection or noisy surroundings. These factors make it hard for them to understand you, thus, make sure to clearly articulate the content of your presentation.

9. Adapt your mindset

A webinar is not just another presentation or lecture. You have no audience in the room, and therefore, cannot judge how well your webinar is going based on the atmosphere in the room. You may have a big audience in total, but to the viewer it seems that you are only speaking to them. Thus, you do not have to speak as loudly as you would in a lecture hall.  Also, the sense of time is completely different, there is no background noise and one second of silence might feel like a minute. Be aware that your presentation will need more time and that it will feel completely different than giving a lecture. Try to rehearse your presentation with these considerations in mind.

10. Form a team with your moderator

In most webinars the presenter is supported by a chat moderator. The chat moderator does not only answer the viewers' questions during the presentation but also moderates the Q&A session at the end of the webinar. Make use of the knowledge and experience of your chat moderator to enrich your webinar and provide an exciting and instructive discussion. It is also advisable to include the moderator in the preparation of your presentation to ensure their answers are in line with your content.