Webinars: presentation or participation?

February 22, 2011

If we know that adult learners want active engagement in learning opportunities, why do so many webinar speakers still just “talk at” participants?

Lately I’ve been thinking about what makes webinars successful, for a couple of reasons. In some recent conversations about learning, I’ve heard use of webinars almost tossed aside as a viable learning tool because of their one-way, lecture format. That caused me to do a double-take; I know webinars can and should be very engaging.

As for anything worthwhile, it takes some focused planning and preparation to create a good webinar. It’s easiest to lead a webinar as a lecture…for the presenter. Not so great for the learners, though, when you consider that one of the most basic adult learning principles is that adults want to be active and engaged. As John Medina says in his book Brain Rules, “we don’t pay attention to boring things” (rule #4). Bored learners get busy doing other things, and your webinars suffer as a result.

A while back, I wrote a white paper for a learning technology provider about helping webinar speakers actively engage their participants. As a result of that paper, I led a webinar for the company’s clients and prospects, in which we looked at ways to increase the webinar engagement factor. And we didn’t just talk about the tools; we played with them a bit too! We also used Twitter for conversation before, during, and after the webinar using a specific hashtag.

Meanwhile, what do you think? Do you see a place for one-way webinars? Or do you think the way to go is planning for every webinar to be an engaging learning experience?

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