livewebclass.com Blog

Since the day Microsoft bought Placeware several years ago, the big question was what and when was WebEx going to do for exit strategy.  For more than a year, WebEx has been looking for a buyer, and found it today in Cisco. 

Good for them!  Not sure this is the right fit, but Cisco has been needing to do something to add to their suite of offerings for some time!  It also was a better fit than some of the other companies WebEx was courting (and some at WebEx know who I am talking about).

Now don’t ya all wish you bought WebEx stock 52 weeks ago…? 

For distance learning managers, there has been considerable pressure to implement an Internet delivery format as more and more people have been resisting traveling to the instructor’s location.  Furthermore, the cost savings for a good “virtual training” program can be quite dramatic.  It can certainly be a much cheaper delivery format.  Nevertheless, selecting the “right” training platform can be confusing, especially as most Internet “collaborative” solutions vendors claim to offer the ideal training platform.  However, in my opinion, they fall quite short when it comes to offering “response abilities“.  Whether in a university or corporate training setting, adult learning studies over the years have consistently demonstrated that learners retain more when we have frequent opportunities to test our understanding of the content.  Educators recognize that lectures with no interactivity are much less effective than a fully interactive learning engagement with an instructor.  So, if this is the case, why do so many educational and corporate distance learning training events use ”collaboration” platforms that do not support even basic interactive events (beyond simple chat)?  Have the training event managers fallen victim to the marketing hype? 

Several well-known corporate networks have recently been dramatically scaled back when forced to use a “collaborate” platform as opposed to a true interactive “training” platform.  Was there an assumption by the training managers that there would be no impact.  In every case (email be for the names), flourishing and rapidly growing virtual training programs were forced to scale back because students and instructors could not realize the results they were achieving with platform equipped with fully interactive “response technologies”.  

Both corporate training and formal education designers and managers must honor each student’s need to know by establishing immediate and responsive interaction that checks understanding of content and supports inclusiveness.  Only then is the student, the instructor and the content fully connected.