Webinars have long become standard educational tools that are used widely primarily for conveying content to large groups of people at remote locations. But how do you make a webinar into an effective learning tool that changes and is adapted each time to meet the specific needs of the client? Here’s a look at a project for NICE – where we handled a webinar’s development and provided NICE with instruction and guidance – and a glimpse into the inner workings of NGG.
What happens when an organization is required to provide training at multiple sites simultaneously – at different locations around the world? In today’s reality, there’s no longer a need to buy airline tickets or reserve conference rooms at corporate headquarters. It is easier to overcome the distance by leveraging online learning platforms.
The NGG Learning and Training Development Center has expertise in developing webinars for global companies whose international reach, and the intensity with which they operate, make it unrealistic for them to find a time in which to bring everyone together in a single country – in one classroom, face to face. Each webinar is different from the last, and this is due to several factors:
- Each webinar is custom-made: Each one is adapted to the needs of the client in terms of topic and content, and reflects the size of the group and the characteristics of the specific target audience.
- Each webinar is adapted to the platform: Development and delivery of webinars are adjusted to match the online learning platform used by the client – including Adobe Connect, Skype for Business, WebEx, and others.
- Each webinar involves interactive learning: Our webinars are not online lectures. They always encourage student interaction, maximizing the capabilities of a selected platform using chat, surveys, whiteboards, video sharing, and more.
- Webinars are taught in different languages: They have a global reach, and are offered at times that are appropriate to the different time zones.
Recently, we held an interesting and challenging webinar for NICE, one of our global clients.
Maya Yemini, a Project Manager at the NGG Learning and Training Development Center, managed the session. She explains, “We had a real challenge. We had to figure out how to give a one-hour session on the topic of VUCA to a group of several dozen managers – virtually. It’s a complex topic that traditionally had been taught in a half-day training session, frontally, in small groups. We were asked to build a presentation adapted to include the type of content that would be of interest to managers at NICE, who were situated around the world. After conversations with managers throughout the organization, we developed an interactive learning program that included surveys, a word cloud, questions, and two movies in which managers presented examples of the influences of VUCA on their professional work at NICE. In addition, we developed an adapted diagnostic questionnaire that we sent to the participants when they registered. It’s a new product, something we developed from scratch.
“Notification was sent to all of the managers – at all levels of management in the organization – from the Organizational Development Department at NICE, with a link to register on one of two different dates so that we would know how many participants to expect in each meeting. The webinar was run in English, of course, so that it would be appropriate for a global audience. In actuality, at the time of the session, we had double the number of managers who had registered. In those two sessions, we succeeded in reaching a third of all of the managers in the organization!
“Out of a total of about four hundred participants (many of whom had not registered), the percentage of those who left the session in the middle was very low. (Because the session was interactive, we could see the active participation in the last third of the session.) Over three hundred managers answered a questionnaire that was shared in the last few minutes of the meeting. The answers of participants to a wide range of questions helped create a fascinating session, and provided the Organizational Development Department at NICE with new insights into the challenges that are facing their managers.”