A UNESCO report shows approximately 254 million students are enrolled in universities across the globe.
Universities offer a great variety of academic content, courses, and formats to accommodate a wide range of learners through full-time, part-time, distance education programs, and more. While they provide multiple opportunities, keeping all students engaged and connected is an undeniable issue, especially for fully or partially digital programs.
How, then, can educational universities ensure an engaged and integrated community?
The answer is, surprisingly, not that complex. One of the easiest ways to keep students engaged is to provide them with personalized content and tailored webinars.
This blog aims to share key ideas and tactics to make your university webinars more engaging, effective, captivating, and inclusive.
How Can Universities Personalize Content For Webinars?
There are several ways to refine and segment your content. This approach is not only beneficial for the students but also for the university in attracting learners from all disciplines, demographics, and locations.
Let’s explore in what ways educational universities can personalize webinar content:
1. Demographics segmentation
This segmentation can be made based on the students’ gender, age, region, or cultural relevance. Educational universities can make their webinar content more inclusive and relevant to all attendees, regardless of their background and location.
For instance, the webinar content can focus on highlighting opportunities and benefits of certain programs or initiatives relevant to local, national, and international students.
2. Discipline or course-targeted content
Universities can categorize and tailor the content on the basis of the disciplines or courses they offer. It can be done on different basis, like:
- Segmenting webinars on broader academic fields such as Management, Tech, Arts, Science, or Humanities.
- Crafting content on individual courses, like Engineering, Marketing, and Fashion Designing.
- For more targeted content, design content to suit specific subfields, such as Computer Science Engineering (CSE) or Digital Marketing.
3. Language-specific content
Webinars tailored on the basis of language helps attract a variety of students regardless of their communication choice. This can easily be done with the help of tools like:
- AI-powered tools: By leveraging these universities can generate multilingual content in text, video, and audio formats.
- Language translation tools: These tools simplify the translation process by converting content into various languages, including English, French, Spanish, Korean, and more.
4. External initiatives content
Educational universities can further personalize their webinar content to suit all their external initiatives. It usually includes:
- Alumni meetups & gatherings: Universities host these webinars or meetups to maintain and foster alumni relations.
- External webinars: It is designed to connect with their target audiences & prospective students or to find potential partners or funding for their institutions.
Each of the above-mentioned initiatives needs specific content and delivery. It can be further tailored based on the targeted region, language, audience demographics, backgrounds, and more.
5. Brand awareness
Webinars are cost-efficient but powerful branding tools. The webinar content for such initiatives is significantly different from others and requires targeted, engaging approaches.
The content can be customized based on the campaign goal, such as:
- Improving brand visibility and positioning among target audiences.
- Promoting the brand to potential partners and employees.
- Promoting a newly introduced course or program.
6. Employee-targeted content
Universities can also design webinars specifically aimed at engaging and connecting with their employees, including faculty members, professors, assistant professors, and administrative staff.
The webinar content can be focused on a range of topics like addressing university developments & updates to collaborative initiatives and more.
In the next section, we will highlight some crucial tactics to help you host an interactive and engaging webinar for all your students.
Key Tactics To Amplify Your University Webinar Engagement
1. Take advantage of your webinar platform
Modern webinar platforms are equipped with a variety of tools and functionalities that empower you to host exceptionally seamless and engaging webinars.
They provide custom features, AI-powered tools, and tailored offerings to assist you in creating branded as well as visually engaging sessions and delivering relevant experiences suited to your target audiences.
2. Utilize social media for pre-webinar initiatives
While live webinar engagement is important, we often forget that the pre-webinar stages are just as crucial. Social media is one of the most effective and highly utilized promotional tools all over the world. It can not only help you connect and engage with prospects, but also inspire them to attend the session.
You can organize the content, initiative countdowns, share sneak peeks, and share speaker success stories on all social media channels to interact with existing participants, and generate a sense of anticipation in them for any upcoming sessions.
Not only does this approach help increase engagement but also attract new participants, improving the overall interaction rate and reach.
3. Implement dedicated Q&A sessions
Dedicated Q&A sessions in live webinars offer your students or participants space and time to ask questions, clarify their doubts, and understand the webinar topic and content clearly. These sessions can either be included in between the webinar tracks or at the end of the presentation.
4. Encourage chat messages & poll participation
Chat messages and poll surveys are one of the simplest ways to keep your attendees engaged throughout the webinar. They can share questions relevant to the topic, take part in meaningful discussions, and also interact with each other via chat messages.
On the other hand, hosts can utilize polls to
- Design quizzes on sub-topics discussed during the session
- Share poll questions to identify and address the most frequently asked doubts.
- Assess the level of engagement and involvement of attendees
5. Incorporate gamification into webinars
To make sessions more engaging by integrating gamification into the sessions. You can incorporate personalized quizzes, leaderboards, or short-duration challenges for a dynamic experience.
You can also include rewards or incentivize the challenges to make it more appealing to your attendees and encourage them to actively participate.
6. Plan networking sessions
Networking sessions enable attendees to interact with each other in a dedicated space. They can have small discussions, foster connections, gain diverse perspectives, and exchange valuable insights with each other.
These sessions can be hosted by dividing attendees into breakout rooms, directing them to the networking lounge, or through roundtable discussions.
7. Host cross-departmental activities
Hosting cross-departmental activities during sessions or post-webinar enables students across the university to connect and interact with each other. There are many quick activities you can organize, such as:
- Panel discussions, with students across different disciplines on certain topics.
- Problem-solving sessions, where students will come together to resolve a case study or real-world challenge.
- Skill-sharing workshops, where students from different departments will be teaching each other new skills and exchanging ideas.
- Quizzes or hackathons, by grouping students from similar backgrounds but different courses to encourage cross-disciplinary problem-solving.
Educational University Webinars: Leveraging Airmeet For Immersive Experiences
Airmeet, a trusted modern webinar platform, is equipped with diverse features and AI-integrated tools for seamless hosting of university webinars, such as:
- User-friendly interface: Easily navigable platform features and straightforward backend ensure an effortless webinar experience for both users & attendees, throughout their webinar journey.
- 360-degree functionalities: It includes a wide range of branding & customization capabilities, detailed analytics & reporting with 50+ unique data points, and unique engagement & networking features.
- API integration: Easy integration with 30+ tools, like CRM, marketing automation, gamification, and feedback & surveys.
- AI-powered tools: Airmeet’s AirGenie enables users to generate event names, descriptions, and speaker bios.
- White glove services: With Airmeet, universities will never find themselves alone in their webinar journey.
From planning and execution to post-event experience, Airmeet event’s support offers 24*7 assistance, including onboarding, platform training & testing, and a dedicated POC.
Whether it is a live webinar, streaming session, or on-demand initiative, universities can leverage Airmeet for every webinar-related effort, ensuring an efficient and smooth experience for both the organizer and attendees.
Frequently asked questions
Universities can transform webinars into single-session activities, problem-solving discussions, panel discussions, and live streaming sessions. Webinars can also be repurposed into post-webinar replays, on-demand videos, short-term online courses, and personalized autonomous sessions.
