Onlignment Archive

One of the great benefits of using web conferencing as a conference presentation tool is the way that the text chat panel can be used as a back channel to allow participants to share comments, queries, links and so on, while the presentation is taking place. Rather than acting as a distraction, the back channel provides added value to participants.
Increasingly we’re seeing facilities provided to allow participants at face-t0-face conferences to enjoy the same benefits. There’s Twitter of course, but for those without Twitter accounts, or who get tired of entering hash tags to identify the meeting they’re attending, there are new forms of instant chat rooms which allow a back channel to be set up within seconds. I’ve just tried two:

• TodaysMeet
• tinychat

For maximum benefit, as a presenter you should have equal access to the channel, which takes some organising. See Olivia Mitchell’s How to Present While People Are Twittering.

The latest figures from Elluminate, which specialises in supplying web conferencing solutions to the education market, demonstrate just how significantly this market is growing:
“Bookings for the third quarter of 2009 grew over 60 percent year-to-year, fueled by significant customer renewals and upgrades.”
“Elluminate is experiencing exponential growth in adoption and usage with more than 625 million minutes of live, online instruction served annually.”
“During the third quarter, Elluminate welcomed over 270 new customers.”
So why this sudden flurry of activity? Well, the economy might have something to do with it: “Much of this growth is fueled by the use of Elluminate web conferencing solutions to address tightened operational and travel budgets.”
Expect to see similar growth in the corporate sector.

Thanks to Eliane Alhadeff from the Future-making Serious Games blog for bringing Digitell’s VirtualU to my attention. According to Elaine, “VirtualU provides an immersive, interactive, 3-dimensional experience that replicates its real-life counterpart in a realistic online environment. If you are currently running webinars, tele-seminars, or live educational sessions, VirtualU can easily transition your event into Digitell’s virtual platform, allowing you to convey your message in a highly-effective format while increasing your ability to interact with attendees through text chat, voice over IP or integrated social media.”
Elaine suggests this just might represent the future of conferencing. Obviously only time will tell. The issue for me is whether the 3D environment provides a more compelling experience than you can obtain from simple 2D web conferencing. The name ‘Digitell’ isn’t a promising start, suggesting a rather one-way experience, although the product certainly supports a highly interactive format.
Much more info and more pics in Digitell’s Serious Games: The Future Of Conferencing.

From discussions I’ve had with people in learning and development over the past year, it seems to me to have been quite a rarity for l&d to have taken the initiative when it comes to the use of web conferencing in their organisations. I know that virtual classrooms are well established in the US and that some 10% of formal training is carried out this way, but very few l&d people that I’ve encountered in Europe were aware of the possibilities until either (1) they were invited to a webinar and were brave enough to participate, or (2) their organisations started to use web conferencing to run virtual meetings.
The decision to use web conferencing is most likely to have been made by the IT department, quite possibly as part of a broader strategy for online collaboration. The drivers will almost certainly have been the potential for efficencies in terms of time and cost. It’s quite possible that, when they made the purchasing decision, the IT people had no idea that the software would have implications for l&d or, if they did, they neglected to tell anyone. It is unlikely that they considered the additional functionality that would be needed to support l&d activities, not least integration with learning management systems and tools such as breakout rooms and object-oriented whiteboards.
It’s becoming increasingly important for senior l&d people to form a close relationship with IT, because more and more of the decisions about the infrastucture that supports learning also have to take into account the application for more general communications within the organisation. Obvious examples are wikis, blogs, podcasting and social networks, none of which are likely to be regarded primarily as l&d technologies, but all definitely of interest when the l&d strategy is viewed holistically.

If there is widespread resistance to the idea of self-paced e-learning, you could consider using live online learning as a bridge. When you move from instructor-led interventions in the classroom to self-paced content accessed online, you are making two major changes at once: not only are you shifting the medium (from face-to-face to online) you are making an even more substantial change to the method (from instructor-led to self-paced learning). This could be inappropriate for several reasons:

• The contrast between old and new could be too much for employees to cope with at once.
• You have two change programmes to manage at once: you have all the cultural issues associated with the change in method, and the technical issues related to the use of new technology.
• Your l&d professionals are likely to be completely out-of-sorts with such a stark change in their skillset.

So, a better strategy for increasing the use of online learning could look like this:

• Introduce web conferencing as a way to top and tail what are substantially classroom-based interventions. Run a welcome session a week or two before the face-to-face event, and run a wrap-up session a few weeks after the event.
• Gradually introduce more asynchronous online activities between the welcome session and the event (some reading, videos, podcasts, web research, perhaps a questionnaire), and similarly between the event and the wrap-up.
• Consider removing the face-to-face event as the centrepiece if it not essential, and replacing this with more live online sessions, some structured e-learning and increasingly some collaborative online activities using forums, wikis, etc.

Note that I’m not suggesting that you select methods or media inappropriately in order to manipulate a process of transformation; of course, it must also make sense to carry out an activity online rather than face-to-face or asynchronously rather than synchronously. But there are many instances in the design of blended solutions in which there are multiple options which would do the job equivalently. In these circumstances you have the opportunity to edge the organisation nearer to familiarity and comfort with online approaches.

Back on September 1st, I posted the following over at the Clive on Learning blog:
I think we know what to call a business meeting that’s held online (an online meeting?) and we’re happy with the term for an online lecture/presentation (a webinar of course), but we’re bamboozled when it comes to live online learning. I’ve recently been reading through all the literature I can fins on the topic, and this has highlighted just how many terms we have to cover this seemingly simple idea:

• The virtual classroom (was the established term, at least in the UK, but by no means universal; doesn’t really describe what’s going on here, i.e. a live event).
• Remote instructor-led training (not a bad term, but the words ‘instructor’ and ‘training’ don’t cross-over well into educational settings, and imply a certain pedagogy even within workplace learning).
• Synchronous online communications for learning (this is the term that Xyleme used to describe the podcast I just made with them; it’s not bad, but I’ve yet to meet a learning and development professional outside the e-learning field who even knows what the word ‘synchronous’ means, let alone it’s implications for learning).
• Synchronous training.
• Synchronous teaching and learning online.
• Synchronous e-learning.
• Webinar (many people use this term generically to apply to learning events as well as presentations).
• Webex (its ubiquity, particularly in large corporates, means that more people know what it means to hold a Webex session than a virtual classroom or a synchronous event).

So what term do you use currently and what term would you recommend we use in future. Help required.
Here’s what I got back:
Kolja Schönfeld said: I have two new terms for your collection: virtual instructor-led training and webcast. In our company we use most of the time the term ‘virtual classroom’.
cynan said: Yes indeed. Dealing with this right now you know, with the perspective of using a term that makes sense across our organisation, not within a field of e-learning boffins too! ‘Webinar’ seems to get people intrigued (even if it does tend to cloud the issue with all those one-way sales pitches on t’internet). Quite boringly, ‘live online training’ often seems a pretty good second.
Richard said: I like ‘live e-learning’ – it’s succint, trips off the tongue reasonably well, and everybody can identify with what a ‘live’ experience is – live music being the obvious comparison one can make.
Mark Kirkwood said: Its a good question. I have always been pretty comfortable with ‘Live Learning’ or ‘Live Online Learning’. For someone new to the concept, both terms make them curious about the difference between them and ILT.
Colin Steed said: My vote, from the Hazlemere, Bucks Jury goes to Live Online Learning (it does what it says in language we all understand). Oh, and I loathe the term Webinar (for some reason I cannot explain) and at the Institute of IT Training we use Webcast.
Meri said: Clive, I don’t know why you don’t just call it ‘live online learning.’ I regularly call live, online learning events ‘multimedia dialogue.’ But when I say that I’m referring to a specific type of live online learning event where all parties can and do engage together in the meeting/classroom. These kinds of learning opportunities are still rare, but my business is to make them less so 😉 Because of the way the first virtual classroom/meeting room platforms were engineered, many folks (myself included) already understand a ‘webinar’ to be mostly a one-way presentation (with maybe a poll or some chat available to attendees during their mostly passive experience). It’s a shame the waters have already been polluted on ‘webinar,’ but it seems to me they have.
LauraLJ said: It is a tricky one isn’t it. After reading the responses so far, my vote is ‘live (or real-time) online learning’. It does exactly what it says on the tin. I have used ‘virtual classroom’ but that never sat well with me as this doesn’t say ‘live / real-time’. I agree with Colin that ‘Webinar’ sticks in the throat. I think, for me anyway, this means ‘listen to me talk for an hour or so’ rather than actual learning through interaction and activities.
Thanks everybody. My conclusion? ‘Live online learning’ is the one for me.