by Angela Smith
Having been a bit capricious about the webinar experience, I feel the need to write a third piece on the subject to bring balance to the Universe.
The answer to the excellent question ‘isn’t this just a PowerPoint presentation delivered over the internet?’, though of course this wasn’t quite how the presenter put it, was ‘yes’. True, there were bits and bobs around the edges, but all of those bits and bobs were designed to make up for the fact that it wasn’t actually a face to face session and to bring it as close to that experience as possible.
Is there value in this? Possibly. However, to my mind, just because you deliver your learning online, that does not make it ‘online learning’. It’s not online learning in the same way that a stage play read on the radio with sound effects and applause is not a radio play. What online learning should do is focus on using the benefits and features offered by the medium to offer the learner the best possible experience. Each medium uses different devices, some of which are unique to it; each has its strengths and weaknesses and the trick is to play to its strengths. Ideal online learning would suffer if you tried to take the content and deliver it in the same format in a training room because you just wouldn’t be able to reproduce what it offers online. To make the best of the web you need to stop thinking of online learning as a compromised version of ‘the real thing’ and start seeing it as an exciting medium in its own right.
And this is something that, as suggested by its hybrid name, the webinar does not do.
If you’ve had a more positive experience with a webinar I’d be interested to know what you thought and if the providers used it to good effect.
Comments