The Virtual Classroom and Webinars

Increasingly, webinars are being offered as a means to provide distance learning experiences to students. Learning, communicating, conferencing, and partnering in a virtual environment are no longer elements of the future; it is definitive of the present. Given the requirement that educators have to prepare today’s students for college and career readiness, educators’ participation in and perhaps even the production of webinars could be considered as fundamental today as perfect penmanship was a century ago.

As teachers begin to engage in developing webinars to provide educationally expansive opportunities for their students, what might be some things to consider as they engage in the task of webinar design?

How about measuring the effectiveness of the webinar? Ken Molay, president and founder of Webinar Success, conducted a survey in 2009 and asked that very question, “Do you formally measure the effectiveness and results of your web seminars?” Only 32 percent of the respondents indicated they always formally measure effectiveness. Over half of the respondents indicated they occasionally or never measure the effectiveness of their web seminars. Is this acceptable? Related to this question was the second question which asked why web seminar designers (including educators) did not measure the effectiveness of their web-seminars. The responses ranged from “it takes too much time, too hard to establish measurable criteria” to “don’t want to inconvenience participants.”

So what could be a “take away” from this survey? It seems that the measurement of the webinar’s effectiveness is the big issue. For educators, exposing students to webinars as an aspect of the curriculum designed to help them become college and career ready, is reasonable and logical. Perhaps a deeper question is, beyond introducing students to the webinar experience, what instructional purpose has the webinar served? What skills or concepts has it helped students acquire and comprehend? How might their acquisition and comprehension be assessed? Has the webinar provided a richer and deeper instructional venue than the face-to-face, teacher-to-student lecture?

Given the pace of technological innovations and the pressure to ensure students have the necessary skills to be broadly literate this century, students ought to have participated in several webinar experiences. That in itself is noteworthy. However, we educators need to push the webinar experience for students past the initial goal of experience, to that of the webinar becoming a robust instructional tool that results in increased student learning.

Dr. William Zielke is an educational consultant at the Professional Development Alliance in Joliet, Ill.

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