Momenta Learning

A blog on topics related to Elearning, online education, and instructional design.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Make those webinars elearning ready

It is widely understood that webinars are one-hour events and they will usually deal with a couple of points that are hammered over and over again. They usually feel like a sales pitch. In other cases, the sessions are informative and are avenues for sharing knowledge among professionals. In none of these two cases we can say that deep learning is occurring, mainly because the audience has not been conditioned for this purpose.

If you are thinking in converting your webinar into an elearning object, you will have to plan for that. Apart from conducting a very good webinar, you will have to conduct it in a way that serves both purposes: as a live session and as a recorded session for elearning purposes.

But how can you achieve that, if a webinar is supposed to be an engaging event that has to keep the attention of attendees for around one hour?

Below you will see some suggestions that will help you achieve the mentioned goal:

  1. Create activities in between the webinar, at regular intervals, or when you will be changing to another learning goal. These could be a simple poll, a game, or a case study.
  2. Create cues in between the webinar recording so that later editing of the video will allow to make that one hour webinar into a number of sections no more than 20 minutes long. It has been researched that short videos in elearning are more effective than one hour long recordings.
  3. Start off with clear objectives of what is going to be achieved at the end of the webinar. This will help integrate the recording with the elearning course.
  4. If you are not able to integrate activities in between the webinar, later production could integrate designed activities on top of the video lecture (using web-based technologies or rapid development tools).
  5. When you are announcing the webinar, packaged the invitation with some reading resources that can be later used for the elearning course. Many will not read this material, but your course will make sense later on to somebody taking the elearning version.

It is possible to achieve two goals with your webinar: to provide a live interaction with an instructor and to integrate the recording into an elearning course. But this requires careful planning and design. If you already have recordings that were not planned as elearning objects, it will not be conducive to learning and you will be making a potentially marketable product into another example of badly planned elearning.

At Elearning in Motion we can help you achieve those goals. We can provide the guidance and planning for your webinars and later integration into elearning courses that you can offer in your organization or association.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Train your presenters on how to properly conduct a webinar

In a previous post I argued that associations can add to their sources of revenue by converting previously recorded webinars to elearning courses. One of the first items, in a list I presented on (very general) steps that these associations could take to achieve that goal, proposed the training of presenters in how to conduct a webinar for elearning purposes. This is quite different from conducting successful webinars for live interaction, where the ultimate goal is not the monetization of the recorded session.
The difference lies on how the webinar is actually conducted. The final format is less than a sales pitch or an informative session and closer to a lecture, where the information being delivered has more depth than what is covered in a webinar. First off, a webinar usually covers one or two objectives, and those two ideas are hammered over and over. For a webinar to work as an elearning lecture, the session needs to have the following characteristics:
  1. The objectives to the session need to contain measurable outcomes, the session has to push the learners towards acquiring new knowledge, modifying their current knowledge, or gaining news skills.
  2. The session should naturally lead to other learning objects that the learners should engage with after interacting with the recorded session. The session should not be self-contained, the learner needs to feel that previous and later sections of the course fit together with the recorded session.
  3. If the available technology permits, add learning objects to the webinar while it is being recorded, and measure the outcomes from these activities.
But all these characteristics will not be in a webinar unless the presenter designs the session with them in mind. You can help them by supervising the process of content creation: from the slides to the activities to the measures that will be established when the course is released. Along with this production process, you should design a training program that should include at least the following:
  • The use of all the technology tools: sharing a screen in a webinar, handling online questions, proper use of webcam, microphone, web browser plugins to handle the webinar platform, etc.
  • Creating slides for elearning that should include the appropriate amount of media, text, and learning objects. This should also include the appropriate layout of the content for elearning courses.
  • Pacing yourself during the presentation. Your training program should include time for practicing sessions before the actual session is conducted. This will also help on familiarizing the presenter with the host (which could be yourself).
  • How to handle questions from the audience, which will be responded during the session (this adds content to the recorded session).
Of course, the above is not an all-inclusive list and other issues might come up due to the nature of the course being delivered, the association type, the presenter characteristics, the type of audience, and so on. At Elearning in Motion we can help you achieve your goal of using webinars for elearning programs you can market as additional services from your association to your members and others who might be interested in your courses.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

More sources of revenue for associations

Conferences are still the main source of revenue to associations. It is during this time of the year when they offer, their members and non-members, access to other resources not available during the rest of the year. These resources are in the form of courses, private sessions, training, and the opportunity to meet other professionals so that they can expand their network.
Another source of revenue is the fee they charge to exhibitors, sponsors, vendors, and others who want a chance to access that desired database of attendees, for marketing purposes.
The conference will likely produce an attendance similar to the size, influence and scope of the organizing association. Some associations resort to bringing popular speakers within the community, or they will offer courses not found elsewhere outside of the conference timeframe (other perks might be included).
The price of attendance is becoming increasingly high for many organizations looking to send their members for training, networking, or promotional purposes. They not only have to pay the conference fee and additional items, there are other expenses: lodging, meals, transportation, etc. If the conference fails to live up to the expectation, many of those attendees will not come back, and that is lost revenue.
A new trend that has gathered momentum is the offering of sessions that can be accessed online through some kind of webinar platform. In these selected sessions (associations will not be moving whole conferences online any time soon), attendees pay a fee smaller to the conference fee, and they don’t need to travel to the conference venue to access some valuable content. This has become another source of revenue for associations.
If you want your association to offer this product for members and non-members, there a few things you need to do, beyond contracting a webinar service.
  1. You need to train your presenters on how to properly conduct a webinar. This is critical because you only have one chance to make a good impression on your audience, and afterwards you can sell the recorded webinar as a different product (I’ll explain in another post what I mean by a different product),
  2. Make sure the internet connection in your venue will be able to handle the video stream to the internet,
  3. Make sure your platform can handle the connection of multiple members and non members attending,
  4. Make sure you have a good ecommerce solution so that whoever wants to attend a webinar can pay immediately and have access to it,
  5. You may have to hire a video recording crew, if you want to offer plenary session video stream, otherwise a quiet room for the presenter to conduct the webinar will suffice,
  6. Evaluate the content that will be delivered by the presenter and make suggestions to improve it, I cannot stress how important it is that the sessions be informative and interactive, this will guarantee that your attendees will come back for more,
  7. If the presenter does not have any interactive content, help them create some, this is very important, I cannot stress it more,
  8. Make sure there is follow up on customer satisfaction and overall impression of the session. This will help improve your products for future deliveries.
I hope this post will help you in your process of extending your conference online with new products not available in the live conference, which will make it valuable to those who cannot attend. Here at Elearning in Motion can help you achieve this goal, and a little more. Contact us for an initial evaluation.

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