Webinars: Design for Collaberation not Interaction

With everything we now know from the world of neuroscience on how the brain learns, why do we still have webinars that are a one way dialog from facilitator to learner?

Of course, the better webinars go a step further in the right direction by including interaction.  But for webinars to become a truly learner centred, learning experience, we need make another step forward and design for collaboration.

Definition

Webinar - Short for Web-based seminar, a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted over the Web. (Source - Wikipedia)

By definition then, webinars tend to be 1-way lectures with little or no interaction.  However, I would suggest that webinars need to be as interactive and collaborative as any interactive face-to-face training workshop.  After all, we learn by doing not by listening.

Interaction vs Collaboration

So what's the difference between Interaction and Collaboration?

Interaction is involving/engaging learners during their webinar.  However, this tends to consist of mindless ie non-critical thinking techniques using the inbuilt tools of the webinar platform.  These include:

• Polling - an on-line voting feature where learners choose an option that best descibes something.
  
  
• Chat - Learners send small text messages/comments to the main webinar area for all other learners to see and read.
  
  
• Emoticons - Facial expressions represented by electronic icons such as happy face, sad face, clapping hands etc that learners use to show their own current emotion.
  
  
• Whiteboard - Writing comments, ideas etc on a central 'flipchart' to be shared by all.
  
  
• Audio - Asking learners to use their microphone to answer a question or offer input.

I say mindless as the tools mentioned above only require learners to make a simple selection or response - no real thinking that is involved with challenges such as problem solving.

Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal.  To do this learners need to analyse a challenge and work together to offer solutions.

Typically, in a training room situation we would include collaborative type activities by setting challenges and asking learners to work in small teams in break out rooms to devise possible solutions.

Well guess what, we have break out rooms on webinar platforms

They tend not to get used because facilitators feel they would

• loose control
• not be speaking
• don't know how to manage them

These are due to lack webinar skills of the facilitator and hinder solid learning.  Master how to create breakout rooms, place learners into breakout rooms and return them to the main room.

You can then add to the variety for learners by including real collaboration into their webinar.  Use some of the following as collaborative techniques for your learners:

• Problem solving
  
  
• Case study creating or solving
  
  
• Analysis of data
  
  
• Creation of questions for other teams to answer
  
  
• Generation of questions for a 'press conference' type activity
  
  
• Get teams to research eg via the web
  
  
• Creating job-aids ready for use in the workplace
  
  
• Summarising information

So when designing and facilitating webinars, design for collaboration.  Of course, include interaction when offering content, but actually aid the embedding of content by:

Designing For Collaboration