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Monday, July 27, 2009

Free Webinars

Have you ever wanted to have a single list of the various free webinars brought together in a single place?   In conjunction with eLearning Learning, we are working with Jon Udell (thanks Jon) to use his calendar aggregation technology to bring together a list of free webinars that we believe will be of interest to learning professionals.

Free eLearning Webinars

Let me know if you think this will be valuable. 

Integrated with Best of eLearning Learning

We are planning to include events that are coming up in the Best of eLearning Learning each week.  We just did exactly that for the post:

Learning Management Systems Flash Technology - Best of eLearning Learning

where we listed three upcoming webinars.  Hopefully another reason to subscribe to the best of eLearning Learning.

Get the Word Out

Hopefully this can grow to address both sides of this need – consumers and producers. 

As a consumer, I seem to randomly run into webinars like you probably did when I just announced: Free Webinar - Models for Learning in a New World.  Because they hit me somewhat randomly, I most often don't schedule it into my calendar at that time.  I know that I'll make a decision later about the event.

As a producer, I know that getting the word out on a webinar can be very difficult.  I will publish the information about the webinar I just mentioned on my blog, but that hits exactly the same audience.  I will tweet about it.  Hopefully a few people will Retweet.  But it doesn't reach all that wide.  I'm hoping that this will become a good way for producers to get the word out.  By the way, if you are producing events that will be of interest to a learning professionals audience, then drop me an email.

Thoughts and Ideas

We are just beginning this process.  We have some ideas on where this will go and how to make it better, but I would really like to get your input.

Is this a good idea?

What can we do to make this better?

12 comments:

Tony Karrer said...

Just got a comment/suggestion via email that I thought I should capture here:

Great work! It would be great to be able to subscribe to this particular feed...perhaps a google calendar with all of this on it.

Simon Fowler said...

Great idea. Very valuable. Would also be useful to have the time (and zone) and name of org(s)/people running the webinar without having to click down.

Thanks,
Simon

Tony Karrer said...

Hi Simon - great suggestions. There are some technical issues with timezones (I've intentionally only shown date) but Jon Udell is working with us to try address that.

Name of people running the webinar is great suggestion.

Hope people will keep these coming.

John said...

This is a great resource. I agree with both prior comments.

You could probably do both by entering the data in a google spreadsheet and publishing that to a web page or blog post.

Sue Waters said...

Yes that was the comment I was going to make. A Google Calender is very helpful. Being in Australia it means the Calendar automatically converts it to my time zone.

I've modeled how we organise our weekly webinars based on Classroom 2.0. I have a Google Calender that people can subscribe to plus an Email newsletter. The newsletter uses mailchimp which means when I send it I can also automatically send it to Twitter and Facebook.

Classroom 2.0 uses a Ning so their newsletter is sent via Ning.

You can compare ours at http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/free-live-web-events/ with Classroom 2.0 here - http://live.classroom20.com/. You can see on their calendar that they have got the different groups to organise their own calender and then they create one large event calender from bringing all the calendars together.

Tony Karrer said...

Sue - do you know how they are bringing together the larger calendar?

FOUNDUPS® (Michael J. Trout, CEO) said...

Tony, there a initiative I have started called eSingularity. The target is for China and India to roll out a complete e3.0 education solution built on media3.0 solution. I believe every web2.0 strategic business plans at this very moment are useless. read this artcle http://bit.ly/HqOqW see who are following the e3.0 http://bit.ly/YkEsq and read the China Prospectus http://bit.ly/18qafg. eSingularity is coming very fast and with it a change bigger than what was experienced during the industrial revolution.

Mireille's Learning Circle said...

this is wonderful
i've signed almost all of them
thank you for doing this

Unknown said...

Fantastic idea! I was just searching for a similar type of e-Learning Webinar which I can attend myself and also circulate them to our faculty members at Dubai Women’s College.. I can see many webinars are closely relevant to what we are doing..
I will certainly subscribe…

Cheers ,,
Sharifa

Sue Waters said...

@Tony, too easy a question :)

You just need to subscribe to all calendars and then add.

Here are the instructions for customising for a blog sidebar (http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/2008/10/27/how-to-embed-a-google-calendar-in-your-blog-sidebar/) and here are the instructions for a page (http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/2008/10/31/how-to-embed-a-google-calendar-in-a-blog-page/). And here is my big sigh for looking at the screenshots and knowing now
I have to update to the latest version of WordPress MU :(

Once you've done that tell your readers to subscribe. And off course they might like instructions for getting more out of Google Calendar - http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/2008/10/24/are-you-making-your-life-easier-with-google-calendar/

Sue Waters said...

I did great work with getting the links deleted. Will send them to you via email.

Blaine Ung said...

Hello Everyone!

I'd like to introduce you to WebinarHero and our Searchable Webinar Calendar.

WebinarHero was designed to provide webinar organizers and online educators with a simple way to promote their online events.

The site is also an easy way for prospective webinar attendees to find webinars and online classes on a wide range of topics.

We launched our public beta a little less than 2 months ago and would welcome your feedback.

Blaine Ung
Co-founder, WebinarHero