Take Two - Delivering Live Learning After the Event

With many globally dispersed corporations becoming more concerned about the high costs of international air travel (especially when business class travel is in the conditions of employment), the need to find quality alternatives to the classroom experience is becoming a key business requirement.  Whilst the "traditional" e-learning course has long taken pride of place in the line-up of alternatives, increased global bandwidth and an increasing range of easy-use tools, now means that we can look again at how we package the live classroom experience for later consumption.

I'm increasingly becoming very impressed and excited by the power of the virtual classroom or webinar to deliver learning sessions.  Forget a passive viewing experience - with the latest web-conferencing tools at your disposal, and a lot of careful thought, you can create some very interactive learning experiences, that - all things concerned - can often rival a face-to-face event.  Every time I use WebEx and most recently Adobe Connect Professional, I'm finding new ways to engage the learner in an experience that can quickly move beyond a presentation to become a truly shared learning content creation process.  I'll return to this topic in more detail another time, but for now I'll move on to say that at times, there is just no way to avoid the need for a web-based lecture.

But...when it comes to there being a time and place for everything, I believe that a webinar is not the time or place for a web-based lecture!  Live training time is premium contact time, so that's what should be happening in a live web-event....lots of contact and interaction.  The latter ensures that the participants are just that....participants...and don't slink off to read their e-mails or worse, go and do something different instead...and above all, actually do learn!

I've already talked in the past about the use of rapid e-learning tools...and the likes of Articulate do a great job in enabling us to quickly get PowerPoint-based content onto the web.  But what if there was a way to bring the "buzz" of the live classroom experience to those who couldn't attend first time around and who are now having to rely on a synchronous web-based version.  Can we combine the best of both worlds...the power of the inspiring facilitator with the power of a highly interactive webinar?

Well, for a while I've been tracking the development of a couple of products that enable the translation of video footage, with accompanying slides, to a web-based resource.  I'll start with the second solution I found, as this is probably the easiest to begin to use.  Veotag offers a free personal "YouTube-ish" service for posting videos to the web, that are tagged at various points, so that it's easy for the viewer to skip to the section in which they are most interested.  For the corporate (and e-learning) market, for a fee it's possible to attach any accompanying slides and synchronise these with the video footage.  So now, for instance, the first 10 minutes of the classroom session, where the facilitator introduced the topic and led a quick brainstorm, can be recorded and made available as a piece of pre-work ahead of a webinar.  The webinar could begin by continuing the brainstorm via a chat room, or by responding to a poll to vote on the items suggested by the live group.

I flicked through their public listings to find this clip - quite appropriate for this blog, as it features a session from one of Elliot Masie's conferences.  Most of the other clips are actually of audio only podcast-like modules, which actually opens up another opportunity - to tag podcasts so that it's easy to find the bit you want.

The first company I encountered who offer a similar service is datmedia.  The interface is very similar, but with their solution, you can even have the content transmitted to mobile devices via the Web or even 3G.  So now m-learning could open up as a more viable delivery channel. And if you have lots of video presentation footage, then this company can also offer the ability to create entire private channels of material.  They also offer a very competitively priced full service video production facility for those who are looking for high production values.  All in all, this is a higher-end solution.

I'm sure we'll see other similar solutions emerge over the coming months, so this will be an area I'll be watching closely.