Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence Contents

JOURNAL OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN WEB INTELLIGENCE, VOL. 2, NO. 2, MAY 2010 135• Greater target access – Webinar has an edge interms of its greater reach to audience andovercome geographical boundaries. It is easy toaccess and use through WWW and is availableanywhere anytime.• No location dependency – As webinar arelocation independent, it can involve SubjectMatter Experts (SME) from a variety oflocations to talk about their respective areas ofexpertise. This helped the students leverage theknowledge base of these SMEs which may nothave been possible otherwise.• Interactive platform – It offered an interactiveplatform to the session audience (students,faculty or college management) to communicatewith the facilitator hence making it an effectivemeans of communication. Having a questionanswer round with all the participants in a setorder like alphabetical helps solve the commonqueries of the participants and record them.• Learning offline – Recording allows participantsto re-run the session and learn the concepts indetail.• Engage senior speakers– as the presenters of thesessions were practitioners and seniorInfoscions, physical travel was not possiblegenerally. Webinars helped the team overcomethe issues and increase the SME base.• Download Material – Participants coulddownload the material of the webinar and read itoffline. This increased the learning window forthem. The SMEs could share applications duringtheir sessions as well.• Feedback –Instructor feedback could berecorded through webinars. It helped to analyseand improve further.VI. HURDLES FOR THE TEAM IN WEBINARS• Need for high end Infrastructure- requiresquality of service and has dependency ofelectricity connection especially for the VOIP(Voice over internet protocol). Call drop-offrates during webinar session is typically 10percent so live helpdesk support through phoneand online chat is required in case of anytechnical issue.• Cost of hosting – As a medium of instruction,webinar proves to be costly as compared to theothers. Institutions or students may find itdifficult to purchase licenses for webinarsoftware and sustain the same.• Restricted Audience Involvement–The two-waycommunication channel has a limited usagehere. Hence, this may prove to a hurdle at times.It may not be able to live up to the same level asa physical interaction with the expert.• Limited modes of multi-media usage –PowerPoint Presentation Animation along with videocannot be played smoothly if a participantdoesn’t have the required bandwidth. Webinardoesn’t allow the instructor to use audio andvideo mode simultaneously.VII.CONCLUSIONThe traditional methods of training in educationalsystem may have been in practice since a long time, thecurrent time throws a challenge for students to updatethemselves on the technologies and their usage. With theadvent of IT era, the learning habits of students haveundergone a transformation from referring the text booksto browsing the internet, having 3D images andanimations as aids.Webinar today has gained significant popularity. Moreand more institutions want to leverage technology in thefield of education and percolate its maximum advantageto their students. It has helped overcome the issues ofbandwidth and leverage expertise but has still to developits potential as an interactive forum and costeffectiveness.Going ahead, this technology can be deployed toharness a formal mechanism of measurement and anevaluation framework. Its usage can be extended to otherareas of learning and its target audience base increased.While the current study talks about the webinarsconducted through WebEx, some common vendors thatoffer this platform can be listed as below:• InterCall [8]• GoToMeeting [9]• IBM Lotus Sametime [10]• MeetingBridge [11]• ReadyTalk [12]• WebMeetLive [13]ACKNOWLEDGMENTWe would like to thank Dr Ramesh Babu, Mr. R.N.Prasad, Mr. Mukundh Nagarajan and Mr. Sarfaraz AbdulAziz Jaitapkar from Infosys Technologies Ltd. forsharing their inputs and experiences for this paper.REFERENCES[1] Gretchen Rhines Cheney, Betsy Brown Ruzzi and KarthicMuralidharan, “A Profile of Indian Education System,National Center on Education and the Economy,”November 2005[2] Home Page, http://www.ugc.ac.in/[3] Webinar Definition,http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=Webinar&i=54380,00.asp[4] Home Page, http://www.webex.com/[5] Home Page, http://www.gotowebinar.com/[6] Webinar Field Guide V1.0, Infosys Technologies Ltd.,2006[7] Anuradha Verma, Anoop Singh, “Leveraging Webinar forStudent Learning”, International Workshop on Technologyfor Education, 2009[8] http://www.intercall.com/© 2010 ACADEMY PUBLISHER