A lot of educational institutions are releasing the benefits in establishing e-learn programs and investing a lot of resourse into creating them. One such program has been established by the ‘Florence Unified School District in Arizona’ in the USA. The school has found distinct benefits thatcan come from the e-learning approach and are prepared to invest heavily into it. There some some significant cost savings to begained with the expansion of e-learning;

The district estimated that the implementation is increasing IT by some 25 percent and is going to save about $100,000 per year on travel costs, staff time, and licensing fees.

The school will be offering many and varied educational services and ech of these are seen to benefit greatly from the implemtation.

Some of the programs being offered electronically to students and teachers include “virtual field trips, video conferencing for teacher professional development, and online dual enrollment courses from Central Arizona College for high school students,” according to information released by Trillion. “The district also started a program to ’share’ classes across the district by broadcasting high school courses and electives to students in multiple schools at the same time.”

Interesting direction taken by this institute. They see an increase of bandwidth from their server will create a service that is 50 times faster. It is set to dramatic increase their educational capacity.

Blogging as a form of expression is gaining popularity across the globe. Seen now as an alternative news source issues surrounding its management, censorship and right of reply have arisen. The following article has been pasted from a blog site where some of these issues are being explored. It is worthwhile noting that there seems some concern for Australian blogger and the fairness in the way their contributions are managed.

Are Australian bloggers getting a fair go, asks alternative news site MyRightofReply.com

(1888PressRelease) October 10, 2008 – MyRightOfReply.com launched in early 2008, is an independent news opinion website which explores all sides of stories in the media breaking in Australia and around the world. The site gives bloggers, groups and corporations a chance to exercise their legitimate Right of Reply with forums submit a story, polls and blogs.

“With the growth in popularity of blogging and an explosion of blogging type news sites we want to put the question out there of whether Australian bloggers are being appropriately supported in their blogging as their US counterparts?” says Mr. Andrew Tijs , Editor of MyRightOfReply.com.

“US bloggers are now covered against defamation claims, allegations of copyright infringement and invasion of privacy,” says Mr. Tijs “and this is being presented along with an eLearning course in media law presented by a local university. This is a great model for supporting bloggers and we would like to see a similar model prominently in place in Australia.”

“Blogging is here to stay despite the many arguments initially deriding it. At MyRightofReply we are acutely aware that bloggers contribute a lot to the fabric of journalism and debate in Australia,” says Mr. Tijs.

“Added to that blogging is good for our mental health with research carried out earlier this year from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne showing that regular blogging makes people feel they have a better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog,” says Mr. Tijs. “So for all these reasons we would like to see more support given to Australian bloggers.”

 

E-Learning in it various forms continues to gain attention and increase in usage. It seems the business is adapting e-learning techniques when ever and where ever it potential exists. Stream 57 is a new form of webcasting that is expanding its footprint out of North America and into the European market with great zest. This form of Webinar is recieving positive reviews and as it would seem on the march toward greater exposure. The following passage has been taken from a recent business report compiled on the matter. It thought it was noteworthy given my current interest in the Webinar Technique.

NEW YORK, Oct 07, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Innovative Flash-based webcasting leader Stream57 has bolstered its international presence by opening its first office outside of the United States, with a new space in London’s West End.

It seems the Stream57 system is used for various different purposes. And the Europeans have certainly seem its potential in the areas of learning and education.

Stream57 is an energetic team that believes in the power of the Internet for learning, marketing and entertainment, with offices in New York and London. StreamLine 2.9, Stream57’s cutting-edge webcast and rich media software suite, brings a new level of interactivity to online video presentations and e-learning. Recently named #745 in the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest Growing Private Companies, Stream57 was founded in 2001 by President Ben Chodor, and has provided software and services for rich media delivery, webcasting and e-learning solutions for a wide range of distinguished clients, including several Fortune 1000 corporations, charities, higher education institutions and health care organizations

It has become apparent in recent times that the webinar format is a becoming a popular medium for industry training. Following are details posted from an industry site for training. I thought i would post them as an indication of the growing interest in the format.

Registration for this live webinar is available on a per-person basis. Participants attend an online session from work or home; anywhere with a computer with internet access (at least 56K) and a telephone. The fee includes one connection to each of the four, 90-minute conference calls via toll-free phone number and assigned personal ID number; one connection to SAE’s online meeting center (via WebEx); and access to a secure course in the SAE Learning Center that contains the webinar presentations, class session recordings, supplemental materials, and assignments. Early registration is encouraged to allow time to review the preparation instructions that will be sent via e-mail and to access course materials.
NOTE: All sessions will be recorded for later playback should you be unable to attend on any of the dates/times listed above

 

News report from 2004 detailing the expanding use of webinars for business use.

 

Tectura is leveraging Webinars in the following ways:

* Hosting Webinars to get the company’s message out. These are usually focused on Microsoft’s product information and vision. “This allows us to take our message and span it across the U.S., and it gets information in front of prospects faster,” says Petrzelka.

* One-on-one prospect-facing Webinars. Tectura has project teams spread throughout the U.S., and these sessions enable them to come together with clients.

* Internal-training Webinars. Tectura has 15 widely dispersed offices. Webinars help in the conduct of sales and product training. For example, when the firm rolled out Microsoft CRM internally, it used a Webinar to train the staff.

The firm holds one major national prospecting Webinar, several one-on-ones, and approximately four smaller internal sessions per quarter. Attendance has ranged from 60 to 300 people each. “People used to believe that participants in Webinars weren’t serious buyers or strong leads, but we’ve found we’re closing more leads through Webinars than in our live events,” says Petrzelka.

Tectura’s experience illustrates what many accounting resellers and vendors such as Best, Intuit, Accpac, and AccountantsWorld are finding to be true–interactive Webinars are engaging, and provide hands-on tips that help their clients and staff reach and maintain goals for business.

“We started conducting Webinars because our accountants wanted information before their clients got it, and Webinars are a perfect fit for this,” says Trae Harris, Intuit training specialist.

Taylor Macdonald, Best’s senior vice president for business partners, agrees. “Webinars are becoming the norm because you can’t get to every city with live seminars. And our partners are finding Webinars invaluable because they reach a geographical client base they wouldn’t have been able to reach.”
<http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-20188846_ITM>

E-learning is now being applied for a myraid of different educational purposes. One purpose or use for the e-learning approach that gets rarely mentioned is that of education for social change. In this entry I have pasted a section for the  Journal of Distance Education. The article is tittled e-learning and union mobilisation. It documents and describes an account of e-learning in practice as applied by the Canadian trade union movement; an interesting read:

‘E-learning has obvious contributions to make toward overcoming the problem of space for national and international labour movements. It can help connect dispersed populations for the purposes of solidarity and mobilization. At the same time, in the case of already overworked activists, e-learning can become yet another element of their activist life for which they barely have the time. In one sense, then, e-learning may find a particularly useful application among novice activists who, possibly assured by the pace and anonymity of e-learning, can nevertheless find preliminary entry into the types of informal apprenticeships and mentor-ships of union activism while also building a basic set of skills and sensitivities. More fundamentally, we saw that the oral culture and learning traditions of organized labour did not mix easily with e-learning environments. However, we conclude that when we recognize articulating activity systems as essential to the realization of a learning process and steps are taken to interlink the on-line and off-line worlds, e-learning has something significant to contribute. The emergence of labour history as a topic in one workshop showed us an important example of how heightened attention, functioning activity systems, and hence learning can be generated. Especially when we see critiques of e-learning from the activists/participants in this research, it becomes clear that these and other points must be taken seriously if the technology is to become more than a novelty. This tells us that e-learning can be nothing less than a form ofmobilization and action in the real world, linking past struggles to present struggles, if it is to retain its relevance.’  (Sawchuk, 2002 p.11)

 

Webinar as a term seem to be relatively new. Whilst researching material on the subject i find the use of the term webinar extremely rare prior to 2000. Before that the method did exist and was in common use however it seems more likely to be referred to as ‘web conference’ or ’synchronous e-learning’. A succinct definition provided in a 2004 publication that explores the subject is as follows;

Conduct a “webinar One step beyond a telephone seminar is a webinar. A webinar is a combination telephone and \\’eb browser seminar. Similar to a telephone seminar, participants call into a conference coordinator to hear the audio of the presentation.

At the same time, they connect to a website that displays the presenter’s slides. The slide presentation is synchronized and controlled by the presenter as if the presenter was in the room with the participants (Florzak 2004, p. 158)

I found this of interest

The Society of Automotive Engineers, an organisation of which I am a member makes extensive use of ‘Webcasting’. Following is a promo for the service. They are quite active in advertising the service and promoting the benefits of the method.

“Convenient and cost effective, SAE’s Telephone/Webcasts offer 90-120 minutes of engaging dialogue from top subject-matter experts, along with an invaluable opportunity to customize your learning through interactive question-and-answer sessions. Topics cover current and emerging technologies and related issues, challenges and perspectives.” (SAE 2008)

Synchronous e-learning is a term used to describe a type of e-learning that takes place in ‘real’ time. This is interest in relation to my research into webinars.  Following news item sheds light on synchronous e-learning popularity and growth.

““Synchronous e-learning now constitutes a third of all e-learning activities in the USA – or ten per cent of the total learning activities in the whole of the USA,” revealed the eLN’s chairman, Clive Shepherd. “Moreover, the take-up of synchronous e-learning in Europe

is accelerating as organisations seek to cut down on travel expenses and reduce their carbon emissions.

 

ClickPress 2008, The eLearning Network provides a unique learning opportunity, ClickPress

viewed 24/09/08 2008 <http://www.clickpress.com/releases/Detailed/90368005cp.shtml>.

As with most industries, economies or comunities e-learning in its various forms has been adopted with enthusiasm within the industry that i work. I train and educate in the Automotive service and repair sector. As a trainer for a major automotive manufacturer teaching mainly in technological change in this sector it can be effective to make use of the tools offered by e-learning. For the purpose of developing my own skill and knowledge of e-learning i have sigened up for a industry seminar on………you guessed it!……e-learning.  The following passage is an excerpt from a industry flyer promoting the seminar;

“This is a must attend night for all those person’s involved with training in the Automotive Industry, a night where you can get some real hands on experience with ‘E’ Learning Techniques, and in this case it will be concerned with ‘POD’ casting” (IAME 2008).