Personally I am coming round to loathing them. Which is a shame. The technical feasibilty of attending a course at a fraction of the normal cost (taking into account lost chargeable time if nothing else) makes webinars in theory a good opportunity to move forward in the way we amass CPD. Having now "attended" a few of them I have to say that I am really disappointed, by the structure, by the content, and by the delivery. And that is quite apart from those webinars which are in practice nothing more than glorified sales pitches.
Oh well.
Kind regards
Clint Westwood
Replies (8)
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Loathe them ...
... to me, half the point of CPD is a chance to get out the office, meet other people face to face, exchange ideas etc.
If you go too far down this route you might as well stick a Z-bed in the office and have done with it!
Nominative
I just hate the name ... and whoever would use it in earnest !
"Online seminar" ? "Video presentation" ?
Another way to look at it
If you've ever travelled an hour or more to a CPD event and found it to be irrelevant or uninformative or deadly dull (or all of the above) you'll immediately see an advantage of a webinar.
Good lectures or seminars in a traditional environment are an excellent CPD opportunity. So are webinars. A person who delivers a poor webinar would probably deliver just as poorly in a lecture hall.
'Webinar' is a bit of a naff name IMHO, but then again I think that 'symposium' sounds really pretentious. Others no doubt feel differently. Shakespeare had it about right (See Romeo and Juliet Act II Sc II).
If you want a bit more social interaction with colleagues there must be better ways of doing it than CPD events!
The differences between a poor webinar and a good one are
Has the presenter prepared?Is a webinar the right medium for the message and the audience?Is it interactive to the right extent?Are you, the audience, approaching it the right way?
On the other hand ...
As someone who has started delivering webinars (also hate the name!), I would like to defend the presenters. It is really very different to doing stand up lecturing and it has taken me a couple of gos to really feel comfortable sitting in my office talking to myself. I have, however, received no feedback from anyone about how they have gone, other than a couple of thank yous from the delegates at the end. Perhaps this is because everyone was asleep or maybe because no-one has anything constructive to say but I think it has the potential to be a useful additional to the CPD market if we get it right. But we can't get it right is everyone says they hate it but no one tells us why!
Ros
Silly made-up words
I quite like nonsensical made-up words like webinar, workaholic and Sarah Palin's "refudiate". They make me laugh
#Ros
As with any medium it has to be used appropriately. There's not much point using a webinar to explain differential calculus.
Many presenters are self taught. This does take time. Alternatively there are courses available, and some of these are very good.
Like Chatman, I sometimes smile at made-up words. Sometimes they word their way into the mainstream (anyone watch 'television' last night?). The beauty of Palin's word is that it was a lovechild of the unintentional mating of two perfectly good words. I've met two other examples of these recently
monumentous - describing a really really significant occasionserrugated - the cutting edge of a bread knife
You can't probably work out the parentage for yourself!