Web seminars (“Webinars”) are online seminars or presentations used to synchronously engage remote audiences with any content that you can present from a computer desktop. Using Web conferencing is simple, like logging into a Web site. Trainees participate aurally with audio conferencing, using their telephones, or computers with headsets. Many solutions offer video to enhance the visual connection between teachers and learners.
- Webinars: A Beginner's Guide
- Engagement Above and Beyond “The Usual”
- Blending Webinars With Face-to-Face
Besides reducing travel, Webinars deliver many potential benefits such as increasing the total available number of learners, delivering “just-in-time” training, or including additional subject matter experts who are also located remotely. Replacing 100% of face-to-face training with Webinars isn’t recommended, but any trainer who hasn’t added synchronous remote instruction to their toolkit is missing a unique opportunity.
Think “Adaption to a new medium”
Webinars are a change of environment, and adapting to a new medium ideally means adapting one’s pedagogy. Like pilots learn to both fly by sight and by their instruments, remote training is much like the latter. Behaviors that are instinctive when face-to-face (e.g., “grab a pencil and paper, draw this, and then share with the classroom”) require adaptation to the tools available. Step One in adapting to a new medium is adopting an attitude of creativity.
Plan your Webinar by thinking through the user experience
To plan a Webinar as part of your curriculum, think through how you engage learners with face-to-face curriculum. What exercises do you plan in advance? What types of engagement tend to be ad hoc?
As you familiarize yourself with the tools available and apply instructional design skills, you will find that some engagement will present in the same way, some requires transformation, and some may not translate at all, requiring an alternative approach.
In the process of discovering and adapting, serendipity will also emerge – you will uncover new opportunities. For example, because a Q&A or chat tool usually captures input in a post-event report, I’ve asked trainees to share a favorite resource (e.g., book, Website, or tool) with their peers. Collating and distributing this user-generated content now goes from a time-consuming manual process to a few seconds of copy/paste.
Another example is “chunking” content, or blending online training with face-to-face training. You could now deliver a full day of training, often about six hours of content, in three two-hour sessions. A variation is that you could partially move a multi-day training session online. Both options potentially save trainees travel, and/or offer them an option to more easily integrate training into busy schedules.
Promote your Webinar with a clear benefit
Increasingly, trainers are asked to be part of the marketing process. To optimize Webinar attendance, keep two things in mind:
One, clearly communicate “What’s in it for you.” Trainees with an expectation that they’ll be gaining something of value are more likely to attend and engage.
Two, consider not only who you can promote to, but through. It’s not difficult to think about sending a direct invitation, but who else is communicating to your potential audience? For example, a corporate trainer could reach customers by having the sales team append a link to their e-mail signature, increasing the exposure of their session(s).
Keep remote trainees engaged
A frequent concern of trainers is how to keep remote trainees engaged – a fair concern in an age where even in-person audiences are multi-tasking with Blackberries.
The first key to engagement: keep the presentation changing visually. Imagine a television show where the images were still images for five minutes at a time. It wouldn’t take long before the audience figured out they only needed to glance up occasionally. Particularly with PowerPoint, err on the side of less content covered over more slides.
Second, increase the frequency of trainee participation. This need not be a full exercise – ad hoc questions serve nicely and save you from needing to script your entire class. Remember that a participant whose attention has wandered cannot look at a classmate to figure out what’s happening – consider repeating your questions or instructions as appropriate.
Recording for re-engagement and reporting
With most conferencing vendors, creating an audio -visual recording is as simple as pushing a button. For online instructors this saves immense time in working with absent trainees. And while the downside of a recording is that it lacks the dialogue so key to learning, many trainers find it valuable to create a library of on-demand content to supplement their live courses.
Recording isn’t limited solely to audio-visual content. Many solutions also capture data from registration, in-event polls, and post-event surveys. With reporting easily accessible, best practices include pre-assessing needs or desires during registration to help better tailor content.
The bottom line
Trainers are feeling pressure to reach more trainees with tight, if not shrinking, budgets. Fortunately, technology may provide at least part of the answer. Like many technologies, Web conferencing is something trainers have long lived without but are now finding indispensible (think “mobile phone”). Live Webinars uniquely deliver interactive training at a distance, and they very well may be the answer you are looking for.
