by Angela Smith
I recently attended a webinar. A whatinar? A webinar! This was a new experience for me and while the session didn’t really cover what it said it would and was essentially a marketing exercise – as they say ‘there’s no such thing as a free webinar on how to create effective online learning’ – it was interesting nonetheless.
Here are my thoughts on what they had to say about creating effective online learning (in the context of a webinar!)…
The webinar took the form of a live online presentation enhanced with tools for interactivity. The presenters made some interesting points about the importance of interaction, a hot topic here at Nelson Croom. The best of the tools offered were those which allowed the learners to ask questions and give their opinions. Questions were stacked up and the presenters answered them as they went along. As this was a marketing webinar with a large and unwieldy audience, this did not work as well as it might have, with questions queuing up long past the point of pertinence. However, with a small tutorial group, I could see this working well. Another tool was used for polling the learners. It allowed the presenters to ask questions of the audience as a whole and then report stats back to the learners. This, unlike the question log, seemed to work better with a large audience and provided useful feedback for the presenters.
Early on in the hour-long session, the presenters gave advice on technology. They said that in terms of technology, you should aim your online learning at the lowest common denominator to avoid the risk of excluding people. This is something that we have always been big on at Nelson Croom – if all of your learners are in local authority offices, for example, they aren’t going to get far if they’re all trying to watch a piece of video on the same skinny internet connection.
Another subject that the presenters touched on that is close to our corporate heart was the issue of customisation. By using feedback tools, presenters using the webinar system were in theory able to change or reorder their slides, change the level at which they were pitching their talk, speed up or slow down. With a small group, it would therefore be possible to tailor your webinar as you go along.
One of the things we say about Imago, the Nelson Croom system, is that learners can learn at their pace and their level, dipping in and out, digging in further to topics they need or want to know more about and skipping the things they want to, essentially taking control of their own learning. The webinar leaders could adapt to what their group were thinking and how their group were reacting. However, unless they were working with a very small group they would have to be satisfied with going for the average ability and level of knowledge and hoping that those at the bottom and top of the spectrum didn’t give up out of frustration or boredom respectively. So while I agreed with them on the point I’m not sure that they carried through and achieved it very well in the context of the webinar.
In summary, the webinar slide for this blog entry would say:
- Interaction is key
- Customisation improves learning
- If you Google the speakers on a webinar and one of them turns out to be a salesperson, you’ve only got yourself to blame when you end up sitting through an hour long sales pitch
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