What is the best way to teach online – through a webinar or a virtual classroom?
When you want to teach or impart a message over a diverse audience, one of the best ways to do that is via the Internet. It allows you to reach more learners regardless of their location. But to be able to meet your elearning goals, you may want to distinguish the difference between a webinar and a virtual classroom. That way, you will know which of them is more effective as an online learning method.
Both virtual classroom and webinar are done in real time and delivered via the web. However, there are differences when it comes to the way the learning is done.
A webinar (which is short for web-based seminar) is simply a lecture that will allow participants to post questions at the end. Sometimes, they are also asked to answer polls and surveys. While you can identify this as a form of interaction, it is quite lacking. In most cases, webinars are created to be an interaction between the instructor and the learner alone. There is no interaction between fellow learners.
This is where a virtual classroom beats a webinar. It is called a classroom because learners get to interact, not just with the instructor, but with the whole group. This is one of the goals of this type of learning. It is how self-education is developed and the desire of the learner to explore more on their own is enhanced.
While a webinar is likened to a lecture, a virtual classroom is where the true essence of learning happens. A lecture is fine if you think about it. But recently, there is a call in the educational industry about a new method of learning. It is when instructors take on the role of a guide as they usher learners to deepen the learning process through their own initiative.
Without proper interaction between learners, this new method will be difficult to implement. This is how an online classroom setting is better than an online seminar. The instructor gets to lay out the content and stand back as the learners gather together, pool in their knowledge and experiences to support each other in the learning process.
Truth be told, there are some virtual classrooms that are advertised as such but it turns out to be simple webinars. It is important to know the difference between the two – especially if you are conscious about what your learners will get from the lesson.
To ensure that it is a virtual classroom, you need to be aware of the tools that you will use. Of course, you want the learners to have access to the content that you created for the course. This can be access to a video, presentation or a shared screen. But more than that, you want them to be able to get in touch with everyone – or at least those in the same group that you will assign. If possible or applicable in the lesson, set up the lesson in such a way that will allow you (and the learners if you wish) to jump from one lesson to the other. That way, you can manage the interaction between learners properly.
One way to turn a webinar into a virtual classroom is by giving the theory to your learners, and then withholding the explanation. A webinar would go straight to the explanation. But a classroom would leave the theory for everyone to see and then let the instructor step back to encourage learners to discuss their ideas about it among themselves. The instructor will not be absent from the whole process of course. They will continuously be there to nudge the conversation to the right path – in case the discussion is already going elsewhere.
This quality of a virtual classroom allows engagement to happen throughout the learning process. As we all know, this is the best way that learners can retain the lesson that they will get from the online course.
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