Webinar Case Study: Meeting a Urgent Need in the Pharmaceutical Industry

I recently interviewed a colleague who designed and delivered a webinar to meet an urgent training need. She works for a Boston pharmaceutical start up of 20 employees and used GoTo Meeting to deliver training to nurses in a call center in Dallas.

The purpose of the webinar was to train the call center nurses to answer questions about a new cancer drug developed by my colleague’s company. If you’ve ever read the package insert on prescription medicine, you’ll notice a phone number to call with questions, which is required by the FDA of pharmaceutical companies. Small pharmaceutical companies typically outsource this work to a call center.

To help develop the training, my colleague interviewed the manager at the call center for two hours. Using this information she developed a 90-minute session with 25 slides. The slides included a large number of patient photos to illustrate before and after affects of the medicine. A journal article about the disease that the drug treats was sent as pre-reading to participants to help provide context for the presentation and maximize the time spent during the session. After the presentation the senior medical advisor from the pharmaceutical company (who is based in North Carolina and joined virtually) reviewed an FAQ and answered additional questions.

The result was an efficient training session delivered in real time, plus a recording made available to those who could not attend. Had this training been delivered the traditional way, my colleague and the senior medical advisor would have flown to Dallas to deliver two sessions (since some nurses needed to staff the call center). Additionally, a secondary audience in the Boston office (employees and contractors) attended the webinar and learned first-hand from company experts and from the questions raised by the nurses.

In total, 3 sessions (2 sessions for nurses and 1 for staff/contractors totaling 4.5 hours) were consolidated into 1 session (1.5 hours) and several hours of travel time were eliminated. In a small organization where resources are stretched thin and staff are in various locations, replacing face-to-face training with training delivered via web cast is a great way to save time and gain efficiencies.

How to Keep Your Cool Online

Picture this: A project manager with a geographically dispersed team, who was somewhat new to conducting meetings via web conference, decided to facilitate a project kick-off meeting using a web conference. Her goal was to get the team on the same page and make a good first impression. As the meeting started, she lost her Internet connection and lost her virtual meeting room. In a panic, the project manager blurted out that “I guess we won’t have a meeting. Why do these things always happen to ME?” in an exasperated tone. Sound familiar?

A skilled online facilitator knows that from time to time, there will be technology glitches, and she knows how to keep her cool and deal with these issues with confidence. Ideally, you should partner with someone when facilitating an online meeting so that one person can run the meeting and a second person can handle technical issues. I also always make sure I can access the meeting agenda and handouts outside of the meeting room (either printed copies or a copy on my computer) so that I can continue the meeting on a phone line if needed. Even better if you can email all meeting documents to participants as a back-up.

In this case, the project manager was using a separate phone connection, and everyone was still connected to the audio bridge. She also had a second person helping with the technical issues. Instead of panicking she could have muted the phone, told her partner that she would start the meeting without the visual and request a signal or a note to her to let her know the status of the virtual meeting room. A comment such as “We are working to restore the meeting room and can actually start without it by introducing the agenda and first topic, etc.” would have appeased her audience.

As it turned out, in this meeting the internet connection was restored within minutes. The project manager lost credibility with her team by sounding the alarm bells and losing control of the situation. If she had been better prepared and planned with her co-facilitator, she could have seamlessly shifted from plan “a” to plan “b.” The participants would have certainly noticed that things weren’t going exactly as planned, but they would have also observed a professional who was well prepared, confident and kept her cool in a difficult situation.

Collaborative Book Writing and Learning

Over the weekend I heard an interesting story on NPR about the future of the book industry called Book It. Host Brooke Gladstone spoke with various guests about the changes occurring in the book industry including the growth of self-publishing and e-books. One section of the interview was with Bob Stein of The Institute for the Future of the Book who spoke about "books 2.0" and how the future of books will be a collaborative process between authors and readers. It sounded far-fetched at first, but as he described the process, I was intrigued.

The discussion about books 2.0 had me thinking about the learning industry and how technology has changed and will continue to change the industry. Many of the ideas that Bob Stein discussed can be applied to the learning industry, for example, readers influencing books by collaborating with authors as they write books. This sounds like learners contributing to learning programs by participating in interactive learning experiences such as wikis and web conferences. "Learning 2.0" has come about as a result of technology that allows for more interactive and collaborative learning experiences and it's good news for adult learners. Adults learn best when they are engaged and contributing to the learning experience. The pace of change in the learning industry has definitely picked up and I predict that adult learners will continue to benefit from new learning tools and techniques that focus on collaborative learning.

Stream 57's Panel Discussion on Online Training

Stream 57 recently hosted a webcast panel discussion on “E-Learning and Online Training in the Face of the Flu, the Recession and the Demand for Better Education.” The panel shared a variety of insights on how to use technology for learning events and best practices for interacting with online audiences.

Throughout the discussion, a live audience participated by responding to polls and asking questions via chat. One interesting poll question was “What is the best way to successfully keep the audience engaged during teachings and trainings?” The audience responded that polling (42%), testing (38%) and chatting (17%) are good ways to engage an online audience. Only 4% of the audience thought that live video of the presenter is enough. I couldn’t agree more. In my experience those who are new to the area of delivering training via web conference will focus on the live video feature of a web conference. While it’s certainly helpful to be able to see the person who is speaking, if your interactivity starts and stops with a live video, you will quickly lose the attention of your audience.

The panel discussed a related question on how to prepare your instructors for teaching online. Brian O’Donnell from Centocor Ortho Biotech commented that teaching online is a teachable skill. Andrej Petroski from Harrisburg University suggested that instructors need to practice teaching online and think about the learner experience. He suggested attending webinars and paying attention to what you like and don’t like about the experience. I have utilized this method of attending webinars and observing the teaching techniques. There are so many creative ways to engage a learner in an online audience, and from every webinar I attend I can either pick up a new technique to try out or note something that didn’t work well in a session. Step-by-step, this is a great way to master the art of teaching to an online audience. And best of all, you can usually do this for free on your lunch hour.

Two for One

This week I had a unique opportunity to attend a web conference with Bob Mosher of LearningGuide Solutions where I also served as the session producer. He presented a session for Metro DC ASTD members on “Informal Learning – Are We Missing a Huge Opportunity.” Bob encouraged us to think about how to establish a "holistic learning ecosystem" that supports dynamic learning. A key component of a learning ecosystem is training was performance support “in the moment of need.”

Not only was the material of the presentation extremely relevant for training professionals, but he also demonstrated best practices when delivering training via web conference. During his 45-minute session he included four chat exercises and a poll exercise interspersed throughout the session so the audience was continuously engaged. His slides were rich with images, graphs and concepts and not overloaded with the usual bullet points of text. Furthermore, when speaking, he annotated the screen non-stop using white board tools. I felt as if I could see him gesturing as he annotated and it added tremendous energy to the presentation. It was a very valuable session where the audience had a two for one experience: excellent content and an exceptional demonstration of how to make material come alive in a virtual classroom.

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.

Converting Chat Text into an FAQ

The chat feature of a web conference is a great way to interact with the audience. At the end of a web conference, the chat box is typically full of a variety of great comments, questions and answers. This text is a gold mine of information that can be reused by converting it into an FAQ. To do this, copy the entire text chat into Word. Delete text that is just “chatter” and whittle the chat text down to the important questions or comments. Then, start writing your FAQ, using the chat text as the foundation, but rewriting or rewording to provide context and clear information. Generally, this conversion process is best accomplished by someone who participated in the session or is knowledgeable about the topic.

Now that you have a well-crafted FAQ, what’s next? One technique I’ve used is to email the FAQ to attendees and those who signed up but couldn’t attend the web conference. This technique works well when you deliver the same course or session more than once and you develop a comprehensive FAQ from all sessions so that attendees in one session can benefit from the questions and answers from another session on the same topic.

Another technique for sharing your FAQ is to integrate it into your web site or online collaboration space. Depending on how and where you post the FAQ online, you can create a more permanent home for your FAQ and also make the FAQ visible to others who did not attend your session. For example, posting FAQs online from a virtual orientation program for new hires benefits all new hires, not just those who attended the session.