Live Online Vs. Webinars Vs. E-Learning

With the rise of Covid-19, quarantine and working from home, everyone had to embrace the virtual life. We meet our friends and families over zoom, google meet, or whichever platform preferred; your work life is also over an app probably Microsoft teams. As learning and development professionals, we had to deliver our learning interventions online as well.

But before I tell you about our approach let me clarify a few things…

What are the differences between e-Learning, webinars and live online training? Each one of those uses a different platform and addresses learning from a unique angle with diverse outcomes.

Let’s start with e-learning…

e-learning is a self-paced learning where the learner is in charge of the speed at which they want to acquire the information. A topic is broken down to modules, each one is very short in duration and would range between 20 mins to around 1 hour. The modules are all prerecorded videos where an instructor explains the material and is using visual aid most probably power point slides or if it’s a technical skill then they would show a demonstration on the tool or app they are explaining. After each module there might be an online quiz or assignment for the learner to complete. Upon finishing all modules, they are issued a certificate on the spot. Learners can choose to finish their training in 1 week or 1 year, it’s up to them to decide.

Usually companies would purchase a database of different topics and employees have access to it all year long. An example of these platforms would be LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Khan Academy, and Coursera.

Now let us talk about webinars…

My Email Trash has 300+ deleted promotional emails!!! I am tired of receiving invites to free webinars.

What exactly are webinars?

Webinars are large sessions, 40-100+ attendees, and here I’m using the word attendees on purpose, because webinars are not supposed to be a deep learning medium. They are mainly used to spread high level knowledge about a certain topic or product. All the attendees are in listen only mode and the only form of interaction between them and the presenter is the Q&A chat box. Webinars are usually 1 hour; 10 mins introduction, around 30-35 mins of knowledge transfer and 10-15 mins Q&A handled by the moderator. The applications for webinars are countless, as long as the platform can accommodate hundreds and sometimes thousand of attendees with proper VoIP connection on the call it would work.

Most importantly, as an attendee you are not going to get deep knowledge of any topic from one webinar. They are mainly promotional or high-level information delivery tool.

Lastly let’s talk about Live Online Learning- [LOL- not trying to laugh, but apparently LOL is changing it’s meaning now 🙁 ]

Here are some questions we had to ask ourselves before transferring our content to live online modules…

• How long can a person sit in front of their laptop without losing focus?
• How would I know that they are following along?
• As a facilitator I feed my energy from the engagement in the room, how would I stay focused?
• The workshop has a lot of discussions, activities, and peer to peer learning; would we just eliminate this?
•  How can we form that facilitator, learner bond that happens face to face?
• The bottom line was how can we deliver the same quality virtually without compromising the content or the engagement?

Live online learning has a lot of similarities to face to face learning. Starting with the group size, 15-20 learns only. It has clear objectives, learning outcomes and duration. In a typical face to face learning, you would have a delivery of 1-2 day (no one does 5 days behavioral training anymore unless it’s a certification), a Live Online delivery would typically get broken down to 5-7 modules, each module would be around 2- 2.5 hours maximum.

Why did we make each intervention around 2 hours? For many reasons, but the most important is maintain the attention span of our learners; sitting in front of your laptop from more than 2 hours would give a person a headache and they would lose focus and wouldn’t retain any information afterwards.

To keep the engagement and the momentum of each session high, we specifically designed different points of interactions where the learner has to actively reply either by texting in the chat box, use the emoticons of the tool we use, a poll or simply hear his/her voice by un-muting and sharing their opinion. Group discussions and peer to peer learning were also a key engagement point we didn’t want to miss and were easily replaced by breakout rooms in each session to facilitate multiple groups talking at the same time.

Now a 2 days workshop would be delivered over 5-7 virtual modules with pre and post work in between, but we kept the human interaction. As a learner, I enjoy having a person to discuss my ideas with, talk to, ask questions, and even argue. Live online learning could be as efficient as face to face interventions if done correctly.