Dave Ferguson responds to Clive’s posting So are webinars effective? by saying you must know what effective is before you can measure it!

I have a good deal of sympathy for Dave’s views. Survey after survey seems to show that organisations seldom measure the effectiveness of training no matter how it is mediated. As he points out, it is easy to compare direct costs and opportunity costs, but that is a long way from measuring the value added in terms of performance improvement or individual growth and the development of potential.

For certain, many webinars are boring didactic lectures. You find them in organisations where previously folk thought you could make a document interactive by digitising it and adding a few navigational icons and links. The token interactivity of which you speak is much in evidence in virtual classrroms,and the pastiches you quote must feel uncomfortably real to many.

Dave is not alone in saying you say one must first think about what effectiveness means, before you can measure it. A similar debate is under way through one of the L&D forums on LinkedIn. There the premise is that the criterion-referenced model of Robert F Mager and Peter Pipe no longer has relevance in the world of e-learning. The argument FOR seems to be that no business in the 21st century has the time or resources to waste on analysis and conceiving of a matched solution. The call to arms is, “Be swift and light on your feet because things move fast and it is important to create rapid responses which may be destined to have a very short shelf life”.

In my view that may be characteristic of businesses which are destined to have a very short shelf life! The point of Mager’s work is that learning is only one performance improvement strategy amongst many. We would do well to adopt the same stance when we are thinking of mounting a webinar, whether it be for sales, marketing, information, transfer of knowledge or skills, or anything else for that matter. We should let the old unfashionable process of front-end analysis be our spur and get back into the habit of asking (or at the very least mentally processing) those good old simple questions:

• Why do you have webinars on your mind right now, i.e. what seems to be the need, what or who wants something new or different to happen or who has asked for training in this area?
• How real is the need in your estimation?
• What effect is this having on the business, team or individuals?
• What is that effect costing the organisation?
• Who most of all needs training / communication?
• What are they doing at the moment, i.e. how are they performing, how is their success judged, how is their performance measured, how does that compare with how they ought to be doing?
• Who must provide support for them to succeed?
• Who else is involved in their success (or failure)?
• What else might you do apart from training / communicating?
• What might get in the way of your solving this problem?
• How will you know your solution has been a success, i.e. what is the ultimate objective of your solution?
• What have you tried in the past as a remedy for this (type of) issue?
• What works for your people and culture?
• What happens if you do nothing at all, i.e what will happen if we don’t conduct the webinars?