Friday, October 23, 2009

PREP for Web Conferencing Success


With training budgets tightening everywhere, more organizations are turning to web conferencing to deliver training programs online to save money and time. According to the 2008 ASTD State of the Industry report, the percent of training hours devoted to live instructor-led online training is growing rapidly. Between 2006 and 2007, the amount of live instructor-led online training jumped by 50 percent, from 4.24 percent to 6.39 percent.


Instructional designers and facilitators new to web conferencing may feel overwhelmed by the prospect of converting live instructor-led courses to courses delivered via web conferencing. While tempting, simply placing the slides used for classroom training into a web conferencing tool and launching a training event will not result in an optimal learning experience for your audience.


For web conferences to be successful, instructors need to devote time to planning the event, including optimizing the content and exercises for a virtual classroom, getting the right facilitation team in place, rehearsing for the live delivery and finally, evaluating what happened. These steps are the key steps of the PREP (Planning, Rehearsal, Execution and Post Mortem) Model for Web Conferencing. For more information on this model, view an article in ASTD Learning Circuits.




3 comments:

Unknown said...

I do not think anything could be more brilliant than this as this provides a great idea regarding using web confrencing for serving the purpose of training, when your training budget is tight.
web conferencing

Unknown said...

You may want to consider using a web conferencing appliance from RHUB (http://www.rhubcom.com) to fulfill training needs and avoid monthly subscription fees. The appliance comes with free audio conferencing, recording and non-download guaranteed attendance functions ideally for training.

Terry Hardy said...

I think, for this application, software trumps hardware. You can really get all the remote access needs you could possibly have out of software, so the need for a hardware appliance is pretty non-existent. Speaking practically, software simply makes more sense.