Putting an end to webinars-for-learning misery
- Summary:
- Webinars are old school, so why have learning professionals (and many others) yet to master them? How do you keep your audience awake and engaged.
A webinar can be a fantastic training tool – if it is used correctly, says Andy Lancaster, head of learning and development at the CIPD:
I think webinars really work, because they allow for time-effective, in-the-flow learning interactions, allowing people to access learning wherever they are, using technology.
Sadly, that is an all too rare occurrence.
Despite the fact that the technology to produce webinars is neither new or complex, learning professionals in particular have a lot to learn about how to run them successfully, believes Lancaster.
He’s speaking from experience. In his previous role at Hanover Housing Group, Lancaster had been surprised at the lack of information available to help him create effective webinar-based training.
So he enlisted Stella Collins, director of Stellar Learning, to help him:
I got in touch with Stella as I wanted to find out how to produce good content for webinars, because when you can’t see the leader it really changes the dynamic.
Collins was able to apply lessons from psychology and neuroscience to create content that was engaging. They used the lessons learned from their experience at Hanover Housing Group to create the Webinars Pocketbook, a practical guide to producing webinars.
One of the biggest mistakes people make with webinar-based learning is to assume that they can simply transplant their face-to-face training online. But this is a different medium, demanding different skills and as Collins says:
You could be good in the classroom but struggling in webinars, because you rely on physical reactions and are not able to handle the technology.
Interactive needs
One of the key differences between face-to-face learning and webinars is the level of interactivity needed, adds Collins:
You need to have people doing something very quickly, and you need to have them keep doing something every few minutes, so they can’t just switch off.
There’s a huge array of tools built into webinar technology to help encourage this interactivity, including polls, whiteboards, breakout sessions and Q&As. Another neat tip to keep people on their toes is to mention people by name and ask for their thoughts on a subject.
Keeping up high levels of interactivity is important because with visual clues stripped away, it’s very difficult for the training leader to gauge the interest or understanding of the audience. Lancaster says:
As a face-to-face presenter you become very adept at reading body language, but if you lose those, you have to find a new way for engagement.
Trainers should borrow a few tips from radio and television presenters, adopting a slightly different tone and inflection to keep listeners engaged. Presenters need to be able to infuse an audience’s interest with their natural enthusiasm. Lancaster explains:
You can’t see the person buy you can hear their enthusiasm, and a lot of people find that a challenge.
It also requires a different delivery style. The pace of a webinar is much faster – they are usually about 45 minutes long, whereas face-to-face learning will generally be much longer (with plenty of coffee breaks). There’s no opportunity to go off at a tangent, everything needs to be far more scripted, with plenty of relevant visual stimulus.
Given this level of interactivity, Collins suggests that the optimum number of trainees should be just six or eight, but certainly no more than 10.
There are clear practical advantages to adopting webinars as part of a blended training approach. It clearly saves a huge amount of money on time and travel, particularly for organizations with a dispersed workforce.
It also means that people are “still in the flow” of work rather than having to attend a course. And the fact that webinars can be recorded and used as a learning resource for a new audience is also appealing.
In fact, the least important element in creating webinars is the technology itself and there’s little to differentiate between individual vendor’s offerings. As Collins says:
A webinar is only a tool. You still need to develop and deliver a really good learning opportunity and understand how people learn and use the technology to help that rather than the other way round.
Barriers
Technology is an enabler, but it can also be a barrier. There are still many learning specialists who may be uncomfortable or unsure about using the technology.
This uncertainty over technology was borne out in the CIPD’s April research report, L&D: Evolving roles, enhancing skills. The report found a yawning gap between the perceived importance of digital technologies and the skills they currently have to apply them.
An overwhelming 89% of respondents believed that delivery via a virtual classroom was a priority, but just 34% had skills in house currently.
Similar discrepancies were found between those who considered digital content development and the ability to support learners online as a priority (96% and 91% respectively) and the skills they actually have to do implement them (36% and 31%).
Even if they are comfortable with the technology, it’s useful for the presenter to have a second person there to deal with the technology and written questions, leaving the lead trainer able to concentrate on the talking.
Some learners may also be unsure of webinars, so it’s important to both explain to them how webinars work and what’s expected of them.
Time spent educating learners upfront is also important, because people may have pre-conceived ideas about webinars. The glut of free webinars from vendors and others mean people expect to be able to sit back and passively listen to a presentation. But it should be anything but a passive experience.
And don’t underestimate the work involved in running as well as creating a webinar. Collins points out that a trainer she knows spends three hours per webinar, getting the technology ready, following up afterwards and answering questions. That’s on top of the time to design the course.
Webinars are not going to work for all types of training, particularly where there’s a strong emotional or behavioural content. But they are a fantastic, relatively untapped resource for learning professionals to add to their training armoury.
My take
As the CIPD research shows, there’s a big gap between what learning professionals would like to be able to do with digital content and their skills and abilities to do it. Which is pretty much the situation Andy Lancaster found himself in during his stint at Hanover Housing Group.
The key message is that delivering a webinar is not the same as delivering face-to-face training. You have to work harder to keep your audience.