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From NetSpeed Leader Volume 35, October 2008
With the world in the economic doldrums, your organization may be scrambling to figure out how to continue to invest in its people. Notice we didn't say "whether to continue to invest." Gone are the days when companies automatically cut the training budget in response to financial worries. However, the pressure is definitely on to maximize your training resources.
Robert O. Brinkerhoff, author of Telling Training's Story says:
"The central challenge for organizations today is how to leverage learning consistently, quickly, and effectively into improved performance."
In the past few years, more and more organizations have turned to web conferencing to hold training sessions. Bringing people from remote locations together to learn in a synchronous, instructor-led training event may seem to be a good use of your training dollars. But the evidence demonstrates that very few people know how to lead an effective web training experience. Instead they bore the socks off their disinterested students who respond by multi-tasking while the speaker drones on in the background. Webinars may help organizations reduce training and travel costs, but do they achieve the goal of leveraging learning into improved performance? Undoubtedly not. Unless, of course, the webinar is well-designed and well-executed.
A recent edition of Chief Learning Officer magazine included an article devoted to this topic entitled, "Why Webinars Stink."
On the other hand, in this same article, Cynthia Clay, President/CEO of NetSpeed Learning Solutions, was praised for her style, energy and her ability to increase participation:
"Clay had a great Web presence....She had an energy that vibrated throughout the webinar. She was as excited at the beginning as she was at the end. Clay assured participation by providing a prize at the end for a lucky individual pulled from a list of those who were first to volunteer answers and questions."
The instructor in the virtual learning setting must amp up the energy, visualize the audience, and encourage their participation. The quality and effectiveness of the web training experience can be vastly improved by the creative use of interaction tools such as chat, polling, whiteboards, and status icons. To move to this collaborative learning experience, a virtual instructor must give up the idea that he or she is giving a presentation.
In an article published by ASTD Learning Circuits called "The Virtual Facilitator," Clay provides techniques and tools to increase the success of synchronous virtual learning sessions. From warming up the virtual learning environment to maximizing the use of interaction tools, these techniques can help you reap the rewards of transitioning to virtual learning.
NetSpeed Learning Solutions has considerable experience "repurposing" our clients' classroom training for effective delivery using web conferencing. Whatever web platform you use, we can help you design and deliver web conference training that "consistently, quickly, and effectively" leads to improved performance.
As Cynthia herself says, "We love getting new value out of client's existing classroom content. And we're good at it."
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