Webinar Design / Training

In the post - Webinar Software - Adoption Advice - one of the comments I made was:

If you've done webinars, you know that they are different to design and deliver successfully than other kinds of presentations and training.

This is something I learned the hard way. My very first presentation was a large public presentation where they had muted the entire audience (dead silence) and there was no moderator. I was alone in my office. Holding a handset (ouch). So, five minutes into the presentation, I felt completely disconnected from the audience because I hadn't planned for ways to connect and make sure I was doing okay. It was an awful feeling.

Out of that comment, I received a question:

Your post from yesterday brought up an important point and one that I had not considered. That of appreciating the difference between Webinars and other online presentations. I would LOVE to learn more. Today, coincidentally, I am doing 4 webinars (I set aside one day a month for this as a primary outreach tool). Now that you have made this interesting observation, I need to get trained. Where would you suggest I look to understand the nuances? We use GoToWebinar for our events.

I immediately thought of Karen Hyder - who helped me prepare for a couple of sessions and is really great and really thorough. She definitely helped up my game. I also thought of Ann Kwinn and Ruth Clark's book - The New Virtual Classroom.

Knowing who asked the question, he's actually a pretty sophisticated presenter. He doesn't need the basics. And likely he's actually asking about information on differences in design between different types of online meetings (webinars, online presentations, online workshops, online classrooms). And then design specifics for these.

So, I'll definitely make an introduction to Karen, but I'm wondering what else you would recommend around this. Likely a lot of us can use help in this area. Any pointers are appreciated.

Webinar Software - Adoption Advice

Good question about adoption of webinar software / services - this time from someone who went to my workshop in Cincinnati - Revolution in Workplace Learning - who by the way - called it "awesome." Here's the question:

We are currently moving toward web-based training for an external audience and have been experimenting with a modest product called Ready Talk. It doesn't have any bells and whistles like web cam compatibility or video streaming, online polling, white boards or anything cool like that. We are considering moving to other products such as Adobe Connect.

We are looking into a contract where we have to purchase a minimum of five licenses for the platform. I think we'll feverishly use three of them possibly four, but my office manager thinks I am nuts. I've made the case, or at least the statements on the reduced costs for travel, lunch, and copies we can expect.

What I fear is that we are secretly not committed to the shift in the way we meet. Our webinars have been successful by our standards and for the most part, we've been early adopters of the technology. This tool would make our web-based training and consulting work worlds better with more opportunities for engagement and collaboration online.

I just want to be sure that I'm not committing too heavily.

To me there's a few additional questions embedded here (between the lines):

• Do you need to commit to that particular tool? Can you change out technically fairly easily? Can you change out contractually? Any experience with being able to try these things out and possibly moving later?
• Anyone have concern about adopting Adobe Connect vs. the myriad of other solutions out there? Has anyone had enough experience with Adobe Connect delivered to a wide audience that you can say what kinds of issues they might expect?
• What about all the features mentioned? Are those important in practice?
  

A few thoughts.

First some findings from the eLearningGuild's recent research report on Synchronous Learning Systems:

• Guild members are resoundingly positive in giving synchronous learning very high marks for its impact on their organizations. Specifically, 94.7% are convinced that a SLS is essential to their organization.
• WebEx enjoys the largest market share with 42.6% of Guild members that use a SLS indicating that they use WebEx Training Center. This is followed by Microsoft with 29.3%, Adobe with 24.7%, and Citrix Online with 11.7%.
• 30% of Guild organizations that use a SLS use more than one tool in their organizations.
• Members that receive formal training on how to deliver synchronous learning report much better results than those that receive little or no training.

The last bullet is an excellent point. If you've done webinars, you know that they are different to design and deliver successfully than other kinds of presentations and training.

In addition to the four they list, I've personally had experience with GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, Elluminate, Centra and Interwise. I've run into a few technical issues with Interwise before. And I used to with Elluminate, but have not had much issue recently.

I personally often adopt whatever is most easily available. I tend not to use a lot of the different features, but certainly like to having polling, recording, chat, screen sharing. In fact, after you've had these features, it sometimes feels weird to be in a presentation hall and not be able to easily poll the audience (and not have a back-channel automatically).

Those are my quick thoughts, but my guess is that there's lots more thoughts out there on what to do around choosing webinar software.

eLearning Curriculum

I received a question today and thought that I should post it so that people can weigh in with resources and suggestions.

We are designing curriculum for a graduate program aimed at building skills to be able to work in the eLearning and eContent design and development domain. What curriculum belongs to prepare students to work in the eLearning field?

Obviously, the starting point for this would be existing programs at other schools ...

Any suggestions on good programs that they should emulate?

Certainly look at some of the comments in: Masters Education Technology for some thoughts from people who have attended different programs.

Other related questions ...

What's missing today in these programs that they should consider adding?

Where else should they look for information to help design a good program?

Any help would be appreciated.

Expedia Service - Horrible - Don't Use Them

The title really says it all, but here was my experience ...

I booked tickets for several one-way hops through different cities in a long week of travel on several airlines through Expedia. I needed to make a change to one of the legs and there's no way to do that online, so I called Expedia customer service. For a dual fee - both Expedia and the airline charge a fee for changing the ticket they changed the leg. What I didn't realize is that the customer disservice representative also change the other flights in my itinerary. She read the flight times over the phone very quickly to me (at the time I was wondering why she was bothering to mention the other flights) and I stopped her on the one that had changed and asked her what it was - and yes, she got that one right. The rest she changed from evening flights to early morning flights.

Unfortunately, I didn't catch that she had made that change until I was looking at what time my flight left in the morning of my second day - whoops - I missed the flight already. So I call Expedia. I'm on hold forever and then the rep tells me that, yes, they can see what happened, but that there's nothing they can do about it. I should talk to the airline. I asked repeatedly to talk to the supervisor or someone who would have authority to do something about this (note: the whole time I'm at a client site with them waiting for me to resolve this). The rep absolutely refused to put the supervisor on the phone. Literally refused. They kept refusing and saying there's nothing we can do until I was actually pretty mad and expressing that to the rep.

I finally asked, "So what you are telling me right now is 'screw you mr. customer' and 'you cannot speak to anyone else'." And he said, "Sorry for the situation."

Yikes! I'm still somewhat shocked.

Delta (the airline involved) did handle the situation at a cost of $150 per leg of the journey in order to yank the reservations back from Expedia.

By the way - total time - 90 minutes - 60 minutes with Expedia being put on hold while the rep talked to people. And 30 minutes with Delta waiting for them to answer and then to make changes. My client was understanding about the situation - but that made things uncomfortable to say the least.

From now on, it's go direct with the airline for me. And make sure I tell everyone that Expedia should absolutely, under no circumstances be paid anything. Go ahead and look up travel arrangements, but book direct.

I'm also struggling a bit to figure out what I can and should do here.


By the way - I'm not alone. I did a quick search for Expedia Service and found lots of examples - actually - I didn't see anything that indicates a good experience:

Expedia: Customer Service Shortcomings - Associated Content
Expedia Bad Customer Service

Free Textbooks

Normally when a PR person approaches me with a story, I'm not all that interested, but this one struck me as a pretty interesting development, so I thought I'd put out the information with a bit of commentary.

Flat World Knowledge, a publisher of free and open college textbooks, today announced it will soon begin the nation’s largest in-classroom test of open college textbooks. The nationwide beta test of its books involves hundreds of students from 15 colleges and universities across the United States. Flat World Knowledge’s free and open textbooks will replace traditional textbooks in a single class or class section at each participating institution. The beta test begins this August and will run through the completion of the Fall 2008 semester.

Flat World Knowledge has built a business model around offering free textbooks to college students. Through their open platform, students will have access to complete textbooks free of charge, with the option to purchase affordable alternate formats of the content (i.e. print & audio versions of the text, podcast study guides, mobile phone flash cards, etc.).

Flat World Knowledge’s mission is to take the best characteristics of traditional textbook publishing - such as expert-written, peer-reviewed and professionally edited texts -- and then flip the old model on its head. Flat World’s books will be open for faculty to customize, and free to students online. Flat World and its authors earn compensation by offering affordable choices to students beyond the free online book, from printed textbooks for under $30 (printed-on-demand), to audio books for under $20, to downloadable and printable files by the chapter, and more. The company supplements its texts with low-priced study aids like DRM-free podcast study guides, digital flash cards, interactive practice quizzes, and more.

Free textbooks. Pretty cool. I wonder if they can make money with the alternative models. If you look at companies like Cramster that provide community and answers to text book problems - often oriented around particular college texts without the direct involvement of the publisher, then you have to believe that there will be communities around text books emerging and likely you can monetize off of that. Just not sure if it will be the publishers.

Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder and chief marketing officer. “This new model of textbook publishing will result in increased choices and dramatically lower costs for students. It can enhance learning by giving instructors more control over content, and by leveraging the power of social learning networks around content. Between the oligopolistic practices of the big publishers on one end of the spectrum, and piracy on the other, lies a better solution – open textbooks.”

There's quite a few things in between - and there's also social text books. But this would seem to be a good approach for publishers to stay relevant in a Wiki world. It will be interesting to see what happens.