This week the Institute for Corporate Productivity teamed up with Elliot Masie of the MASIE Center Learning Lab and Think Tank to deliver a webinar on Informal & Social Learning. While the content of the webinar was interesting (a summary of findings of research conducted by i4cp with commentary/interpretation by Masie), the delivery was a missed opportunity by Masie to model best practices for utilizing web conferencing software. A few observations:
1. The first three minutes: My first post on this blog was based on an article by Masie about the importance of the first three minutes of learning, which set the tone for the rest of an event. In this case the first three minutes consisted of an overview of findings as the audience viewed a title slide (not even a slide with key findings). A much more compelling opening would have been to turn some of the more interesting findings into questions for the audience such as, “What was the #1 practice correlated with the occurrence of informal learning?” (answer: sharing best practices).
2. Duration of each slide: About halfway into the webinar, one slide remained on the screen for 9 minutes as the speakers talked, and the final content slide stayed up for a whopping 12 minutes! Keeping your audience engaged and attentive is an art not a science, but in this case the delivery team could have easily included a few more interesting slides to support their commentary.
3. Q & A: The last ten minutes of the session were dedicated to Q & A. A good delivery team can weave the questions and answers throughout the web conference. If questions are collected throughout the session, the producer needs to be on the lookout for questions that map to a particular piece of content and get the speaker to incorporate questions from the audience during the entire session.
Every time we use learning technology, even for a presentation that is not meant to be a true learning event, we have the opportunity to practice what we preach about adult learning. Masie's content was intriguing, as always, but the delivery needed more polishing.
1. The first three minutes: My first post on this blog was based on an article by Masie about the importance of the first three minutes of learning, which set the tone for the rest of an event. In this case the first three minutes consisted of an overview of findings as the audience viewed a title slide (not even a slide with key findings). A much more compelling opening would have been to turn some of the more interesting findings into questions for the audience such as, “What was the #1 practice correlated with the occurrence of informal learning?” (answer: sharing best practices).
2. Duration of each slide: About halfway into the webinar, one slide remained on the screen for 9 minutes as the speakers talked, and the final content slide stayed up for a whopping 12 minutes! Keeping your audience engaged and attentive is an art not a science, but in this case the delivery team could have easily included a few more interesting slides to support their commentary.
3. Q & A: The last ten minutes of the session were dedicated to Q & A. A good delivery team can weave the questions and answers throughout the web conference. If questions are collected throughout the session, the producer needs to be on the lookout for questions that map to a particular piece of content and get the speaker to incorporate questions from the audience during the entire session.
Every time we use learning technology, even for a presentation that is not meant to be a true learning event, we have the opportunity to practice what we preach about adult learning. Masie's content was intriguing, as always, but the delivery needed more polishing.
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