Breeze: “A Wonderful Juxtaposition of Synchronous and Asynchronous”
Clients often see the value of following up on a live learning session by archiving it to create an on-demand asynchronous lesson for later use, but the opposite approach is also very valuable, says Easton. She strongly advocates the use of live Webcast sessions to follow-up on packaged asynchronous courseware.
Easton points to an ongoing project her company has undertaken on behalf of TJ Walker Media Training Worldwide as a good example of a flexible and layered approach to learning. The company is built around TJ Walker, who is well-known for his training workshops—essentially, Walker is a presenter who gives presentations on how to give presentations. He travels all over the world giving workshops to business executives to help them to give better PowerPoint demonstrations, improve their public speaking skills, give press conferences, and deal with the media.
The TJ Walker project, still under development, will include both pre-packaged on-demand streaming media courseware and live streaming media sessions. "The online courseware will integrate video and audio, and then he [Walker] will be offering on a monthly basis live workshops, using the Breeze platform," says Easton. She adds that during the live sessions "folks can come into the Breeze environment, and they can give their own presentations right there with video or audio" as a sort of practice session, and their performances could also be critiqued. "Then we'll start to archive," says Easton.
"TJ will give a workshop, and we'll record it. Then for the next workshop, we may use some content from that first workshop," says Easton. The students will start off with the first workshop (either live or asynchronously at their own pace). Then they'll get an announcement saying that a live session is scheduled such and such a time. Then that live session too will be recorded and get archived and become part of the existing courseware. So the course will be continually updated, with each new session building on what came before, like piling up layers," says Easton. "Lesson one, then a live Webcast; lesson two, then a live Webcast; lesson three, live Webcast; and so on. And the live Webcast will be to summarize and review and to allow participants ask questions and practice," she says.
"The live component reinforces and enhances the pre-recorded, on-demand, asynchronous courseware and creates layered learning," she says. "The whole objective is to support the on-demand content with live content, for several reasons--reinforcement of ideas and skill building, team building, role playing, and for Q&A."
Easton is excited about this soon-to-be completed project and calls it "a wonderful juxtaposition of the synchronous and asynchronous," enabled by Breeze. She says the T. J. Walker program will consists of 5 "online component" lessons of about an hour's duration each, during which learners will be able to "listen to streaming audio and video of T. J." Then every month or so there will be a scheduled live session of between 60 and 90 minutes.
Easton also likes the way Breeze's flexibility makes it useful for both large and small groups. She says a Breeze experience, like a live classroom experience, is best when the class size is kept small. "For highly interactive experiences where you want the participants to have audio access as well, I would say that 25 is about the maximum," she says. Once you get up to 75-80 participants, a live highly interactive Breeze experience can become "noisy." "When you need to make a presentation to hundreds of people through Breeze," she says, "the chat should moderated so that only certain questions and answers are posted, versus an open forum, so you can maintain some control."
That's not to say you can't have very engaging experiences with large groups; you can, says Easton. "We run sessions with 50, 60, 70 participants," she says. "People are getting more familiar with having a more integrated online experience, so they realize they are not going to be just chattering." Their self-discipline makes the interactions go more smoothly and minimizes the "noise" of too much chatter that can disrupt a large group.
However, with extremely large groups, Easton recommends having no live chat at all, but instead limiting the learning session to just a straight presentation. But that still doesn't mean you have to give up all interaction. "When the presentation is over, you could switch over to a pure Q&A time period, and then you could have a larger chat window. You could have someone moderate the Q&A and then post questions, and then everybody could be participating," she says.
The key to effective Breeze use, says Easton, "is in designing how you're going to use the tool. You have to look beyond the standard classroom approach. You have to match content and audience expectations. But if you're conscious of every interaction, I believe Breeze can provide as effective a learning experience online as you can get in person."