At the eLN Showcase event on 9th July, the Onlignment team each presented a Pechu Kucha (20 slides, each 20 seconds in duration). Today we present Phil’s session, titled Getting the job done with live online training.
Most training is carried out live in the classroom or on-the-job, but face-to-face instruction is not always the most practical or cost-effective option. Web conferencing allows you to continue to offer live training but without the need for all participants to be present in the same location. The ‘virtual classroom’ is ideal for running short training sessions, follow-ups, seminars and meetings. In this Pecha Kucha session, you’ll learn how leading organisations are making use of web conferencing to provide more training more efficiently and how they have equipped their classroom instructors to make a successful transition to online delivery.
Tag: webinars
When do you speak for free?
Looks at when you should agree to speak for free and when you should demand a fee.
As a consultant who spends a great deal of time delivering presentations, both online and face-to-face, I am faced with the tricky decision of knowing whether or not to accept invitations to speak for free. If you are an academic, or an employee of an organisation that’s happy to sponsor you speaking externally, then the issue doesn’t arise; but for someone who is self-employed, the time required to prepare for, travel to and then deliver a presentation for free is all unpaid – you may not even get your expenses paid.
In time, I have developed my own personal guidelines:
- If the event is run by a vendor or is in-company, then I expect a fee. If there is a requirement for me to develop a customised presentation, then I expect an even bigger fee.
- If the event is open to the public but there is likely to be only a small audience or an audience to whom I am unlikely to be able to offer consulting services, then I expect a fee. If not, then the event must be in an exotic location (so no good for webinars) and all expenses must be paid!
- If the event is public and there will be a good-sized audience of reasonable prospects, then I will speak for nothing in order to obtain the exposure. However, I will decide what I present and generally this will be a presentation I’ve delivered several times before.
So those are my rules, but everyone has to think this through for themselves. If you need some help in this, you could do no better than to get hold of Lee Salz’s book Stop Speaking for Free. He’s got a short video introducing his ideas on YouTube.
Learning and Skills Group webinars: a success story
A look at the webinar series run by the Learning and Skills Group.
Those looking for a good model to follow when it comes to running webinars could do worse than to look in on the series of events run by the Learning and Skills Group (LSG). Although fashioned primarily around the needs of attendees at the Learning Technologies conference, all of the webinars are actually available freely to all comers. They must be doing something right because they’ve been running now for many years and attract audiences in the hundreds. So, what do they do well:
- The sessions are put together and hosted by Don Taylor, a highly experienced conference chair.
- Don makes sure none of the speakers get into sales mode.
- Every session is thoroughly rehearsed.
- They keep to time.
- The format is kept really simple, with most interactions occuring through text chat.
- Participants are actively encouraged to use the text chat facility as a back channel and they take advantage of this energetically.
- All sessions are recorded and the videos made available to anyone.
All of the partners in Onlignment have presented at LSG webinars. Peek back through the archive and you’ll find Phil Green talking about Building e-learning for classroom trainers and Barry Sampson on Social media behind the firewall – the paranoid organisation. My own webinar, held this morning, on bridging the e-learning skills gap, will be available shortly.
Multitasking is now every presenter's problem
Multitasking occurs in face-to-face conferences as well as webinars.
I’ve finally got round to reading Click, Bill Tancer’s brilliant expose of our secret lives as revealed through our online searches. I was interested in Bill’s observation about modern conference events:
“With the pervasiveness of wireless hot spots and laptops that have built-in wireless capability, conference audiences have turned keynotes into multitasking events, half-listening to presentations while simultaneously answering email and browsing the web.”
What struck me is how the gap is narrowing between face-to-face and online events. You could usually rely on a fully attentive audience face-to-face while bemoaning the ease with which multitasking occurs online. The reality is that the same phenomenon is now occuring in each setting. This is not to suggest that multitasking (or rapid switching between tasks, which is really what is happening) is an evil that is spreading and needs to be stamped out. Multitasking – assuming that the audience is not blogging or tweeting about the presentation, which is a positive sign of even more focused attention – is an exertion of people power. I’ll do what I want when I want. If you can grab my attention and hold it then good for you. If not, then there’s plenty more I can be doing with my time.
Is there a limit? To my mind yes. I cannot tolerate laptops and phones in use during workshops and other highly participative learning events – it’s an insult to all concerned, and if you as facilitator don’t deal with it, other members of the group surely will.
Could the star system apply to live online events?
Predicts that now we can have our conferences online, the top speakers in the world will take all the best speaking slots.
Webinars provide an opportunity for experts to share their thoughts and experiences with a wide audience. They can also do this through face-to-face conferences, but are limited in their reach by geography. The cost of flying an expert over and then putting them up while they recover from the jet lag and do a little sightseeing is often prohibitive. The result is lots of second division experts, who live more locally, filling in to deliver similar expertise.
Online, of course, the situation is quite different. The limitations on using the first divison expert are much reduced. You’re paying for a couple of hours at most, rather than a week away and all those expenses. Even if the top expert has an extortionate hourly rate (and if you’re one of them then why not?) then they are likely to be affordable.
So, what was once a very localised business can become centralised and a star system can operate, as in films, TV, books and sports. The division one players get most of the business and attract celebrity status. Those in division two pick up the scraps.
The same can apply to live online learning events as it does to webinars, but here there is a moderating factor. Whereas you can run a webinar for practically any size audience, a learning event is likely to run for 16 people or less. And division one teachers and trainers only have so many hours in the day, leaving plenty of scope for others. So, where the star system will operate most noticeably is with presentations, whether live or recorded. The world is becoming a much smaller place, and that makes it easier for the powerful to become more so.
Pecha-kucha online
Proposes the Pecha-kucha format for webinar presentations.
In reading Garr Reynold’s excellent Presentation Zen, I came across a great idea for webinars called Pecha-kucha. Apparently, Pecha-kucha (Japanese for chatter) was started in 2003 by Tokyo expatriate architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein as an alternative presentation format. Each speaker has 20 slides, each of which must be shown for 20 seconds, with which to tell their story or make their point. The slides advance automatically and so after 6 minutes and 40 seconds you’re done.
According to Reynolds, Pecha-kucha nights are now being held in over 80 cities around the world. I reckon a Pecha-kucha hour would work just great as the basis for a webinar.
Now all I’ve got to work out is how to pronounce it.
Web meetings, webinars and virtual classrooms compared
A table comparing the three principle uses of real-time online communication.
Unless I’ve missed something important, there seem to be three distinct uses for real-time online commmunications. The following table represents a first attempt at clarifying the discriminating characteristics of these three:
Web meetings | Webinars | Virtual classrooms | |
Primary purpose | To solve problems and make decisions | To share ideas and experiences | To facilitate learning |
Secondary purposes | To provide updates | To promote the speaker or organiser | None |
Face-to-face equivalent | A short business meeting | A session at a seminar or conference | A classroom session |
Who’s in charge? | The chair of the meeting | The host and/or presenter | The teacher / trainer |
Typical activities | Presentation of situation updates and proposals; discussion of proposals; decision-making; action planning | Presentation of ideas and experiences; demonstrations; polling of audience opinion; Q&A; discussion; participant-to-participant text chat (back channel) | Ice breakers; presentation of formal content; software demos (for IT training); group exercises and activities; discussion; formative and summative assessment |
Visual focus | Participant webcams; shared documents; slides | Slides; presenter webcam; text chat; polls; website tours | Slides; electronic whiteboard; questions/polls; shared applications; website tours; text chat |
Auditory focus | Participants’ vocal contributions | Host / presenters’ voices; possibly also participants’ vocal contributions | Teacher/trainer’s voice and participants’ vocal contributions |
Most frequently used interactive devices | Voice; text chat | Voice; text chat; polls | Voice; text chat; electronic whiteboard; questions/polls; application sharing; break-out rooms |
Tangible outputs | Agreed actions / minutes | Recordings; participant feedback | Recordings; participant feedback; assessment scores |
If you believe there are other, distinct forms, or feel you could refine or add to this table, I’d love to hear from you.
The multitask assumption
Makes the case that multitasking is natural and only to be expected for webinar participants.
The multitask assumption. Sounds like a good name for a spy film, probably starring someone like Michael Caine, and with a plot so intricate that you never really know which side each character is on – who’s a friend and who’s an enemy.
So what is the multitask assumption? It’s the assumption you can safely make with any webinar that a good proportion of the audience is multitasking – you know, checking emails, answering the phone, listening to music, finishing off a report, and so on. They intend to concentrate on your webinar – after all, that’s why they signed up – but they just can’t help themselves, the distractions are so persistent and so inviting.
This sounds like a situation where it’s quite clear who’s a friend and who’s an enemy: the friends are those who are listening to you with rapt attention; the enemies all those others who can’t even pay you the respect of tuning in with all faculties engaged for a single hour of their lives.
But are these people your enemies? Do you behave any differently when you’re attending someone else’s webinar? I don’t think so. For many, attending a webinar is like listening to the radio or watching TV – you tune in and out depending on the the attractiveness of what else is on offer. You would do exactly the same if you were at a conventional meeting or conference too, but you can’t because it looks bad; it’s disrespectful and insensitive.
As far as participants are concerned, multitasking is a benefit of the webinar format, not a drawback. For the facilitator, it’s a challenge. You could fight it by insisting on continual interactivity, demanding that participants use webcams so you can see what they’re up to (I know, not really practical for more than a small group), or using one of these new platforms that let you know when each participants’ web conferencing window is active or submerged behind a host of others.
Here’s what Ken Molay had to say in Must your webinar be interactive? on The Webinar Blog: ‘I prefer to work on presentation style and techniques that subtly (or not so subtly) refocus attention on your content and your presentation, over and over, in a continuous barrage of attention recapture cues. I assume that people are multitasking and drifting. So I use vocal pitch and speed changes to recapture their auditory attention and interest. I use verbal directions that tell them to refocus on the screen: “So, as you see at the top of the first column…” or “Look at the picture I used to illustrate this concept…” And of course I use direct interactions through chat dialogs, polls, whiteboards, or other technology features. But even when you have strong content and do everything right, you can simply get an audience that prefers a passive experience.’
A webinar is not a virtual classroom session (see So what exactly is a webinar?). With a webinar, there isn’t the expectation that there would be in a classroom that everybody should be fully engaged and participate in every activity. So by all means try your hardest to maintain their attention – after all, you must believe that what you have to say is important – but don’t get upset if you don’t succeed. Assume multitasking and don’t take it personally.