by Angela Smith
I’ve already been fair about the webinar, so now let me be harsh, as real learners often are. The webinar in question purported to be about creating effective online learning, but would more properly have been named ‘Why not use a webinar?’ which raised my hackles more than a little. However, as I said before, I went into it with open eyes, having Googled the speakers.
Here I turn away from what I did and didn’t agree with philosophically and get down to what it was actually like as an experience…
When I finally joined the webinar – to start with I couldn’t get through on the phone to listen to the speaker because ‘all the lines were busy’ – things were in full swing. Unfortunately I’d missed the explanation of how to use the tools, but on the plus side they were quite self-explanatory.
I found myself listening to two speakers in the presence of a silent administrator type and an unknown number of other attendees. On screen, slides were coming up one after another and the presenters talked us through each point, just like any other presentation. Actually, sometimes the slides and the chat were way too similar, not to mention being ugly and too texty, but I’m not here to diss the providers’ presentation skills.
The webinar provided a useful questioning tool. This allowed one of the attendees after about ten minutes to say what we were all thinking: ‘isn’t this just a PowerPoint presentation delivered over the internet?’ I did ask some Excellent Questions, of course, but I can’t claim this one for myself. I agreed though and was slightly disappointed with the whole experience for this reason: a ‘webinar’ sounds much more exciting than an ‘online presentation’.
Anyway, by way of trying to explain why this was not just an online presentation, the presenters described the technologies available for monitoring the attention level of your audience etc. However, I had a bit of a problem with these technologies: they assume that you can tell whether someone is interested in a session by their interaction with their computer and browser. Of course I may appear to be listening because I have the webinar toolbar up, but who says I’m not also staring out of the window, or looking at lolcats, or talking to someone on the phone (which I was at times)?
They also pointed to the interaction tools, which of course don’t enhance the seminar-style experience, they seek to recreate it. However, all too often, they recreate it poorly. For example, the ask a question functionality: when you stick your hand up in a seminar, the thing stops, you ask your question, everyone has the benefit of the answer and then it continues; when you want to ask a question in the webinar, you have to type it in. Now, perhaps this says something about me, but I found it almost impossible to keep track of what the presenters were saying while I was formulating the right wording for and typing in my questions, so I got left behind.
All this brings me to one of my main frustrations with the webinar: interruptions. Busy professionals who are learning in the workplace or at home can’t help being interrupted. Whether it is colleagues, family members or the cat sitting on the keyboard and refusing to move (which he was at times) there’s always something and the webinar just didn’t seem to account for that. My opinions about this were set in stone when, interrupted by a call from work, I went away from my desk for five minutes and came back to see that my Excellent Questions had been answered. They were helpfully highlighted to tell me this. Of course everyone else listening had had the benefit of the answers to my questions, but I’d missed them totally.
It might have been at this point that I gave up paying proper attention, though I couldn’t say for certain.
To be fair, this was the only webinar I have ever attended, but that was what it was like.
In summary, the webinar slide for this blog entry would say:
- Paying attention for an hour is a big ask face-to-face; it’s an even bigger ask online
- Feeling left behind is one of the worst feelings a learner can have
- You can’t have a ‘looking at funny pictures of cats’ break when you are timetabled in for an hour of listening without getting left behind