Live session

A live session is the part of an online course where everyone is in the same place at the same time. That's its value and its cost. It gives students something a recording can't: a chance to ask their own question and get an answer, in the moment, from the person teaching. It also asks everyone to show up at a fixed hour.

What happens in a good live session?

The weakest live sessions are lectures that could have been recordings. The strongest use the live time for what only live time can do. A common, workable shape for a 60–90 minute session:

• Short teaching segment (10–15 minutes) on one idea, or none if the recorded lessons covered it.
• Practice or small-group work, often in breakout rooms.
• Hot seats or review: the instructor works through one or two students' real situations while the group watches.
• Open questions to close.

Live sessions inside a course take several forms: weekly group classes, office hours, Q&A calls, demonstrations and practice labs. What they share is that they're for enrolled students and they're part of the teaching.

Live session vs webinar

The two use the same technology, which is why they get confused. A webinar is usually a free, one-to-many event for people who haven't bought yet, and its job is to introduce you and often to invite people into a course (see webinar funnel). A live session is for people who already enrolled, and its job is teaching. Webinars tend to be one-way with chat on the side. Live sessions should be two-way, with students on camera and talking.

Do you need live sessions in a course?

No. Plenty of good courses are fully recorded. But live sessions are the simplest way to add the human presence that recorded courses lack. Our data doesn't isolate live sessions, so I won't give you a completion figure for them. What I've seen is that a single weekly call changes how a course feels. Students stop thinking of it as a library and start thinking of it as a class they belong to.

Add live sessions when students need feedback on their own work, when the subject raises questions you can't predict, or when you're charging enough that people expect access to you. Skip them, or make them optional, when your students span many time zones or the course is short and factual. Recording helps students who can't attend. Built-in meetings record by default, so tell students first, and stop the recording before anyone shares personal material.

Adding regular live sessions to recorded lessons is what turns a course into a hybrid course.

Where live sessions happen

You don't need a separate video account. Ruzuku has built-in live meetings on every plan, so neither you nor your students need a Zoom account, and there's a Zoom integration if you'd rather use Zoom. The panel below gives the details. For how live and recorded formats compare, read live vs pre-recorded online courses.