Evaluation of Webinars

Corona led to a rapid increase in digital training opportunities for companies. Webinars are not yet very familiar to many companies and employees, at least not in the long term, it is particularly important to pay attention to the quality of them: If you have experienced your first webinars as chaotic, cumbersome and unnecessary, it will be very difficult to convince yourself in the future that the next webinars will be helpful. Webinars should therefore always be evaluated.

When evaluating webinars, special attention should be paid to three central differences between face-to-face events and webinars: the duration of the webinars, the method of the webinars and the technology.

The Duration of the Webinars:

In contrast to classic face-to-face training, webinars are usually comparatively short. Anyone who has ever experienced that a cancelled eight-hour face-to-face training is translated 1 to 1 into an online event knows why. It is much more difficult for participants to maintain concentration in a virtual setting over a longer period of time. As a result, webinars usually have a length of 20 to 90 minutes. In the evaluation, it is therefore essential to address whether the time frame was chosen correctly. In order to be able to use this short time as effectively as possible, the participants should already have a clear idea of what to expect in the webinar before the measure. At the same time, suitable working materials should be used to ensure that the participants can deepen or recall the content themselves

However, the shorter scope of a webinar also has a completely different effect: If you have only spent 45 minutes in a webinar, you don’t want to spend 10 minutes on an evaluation sheet afterwards. The evaluation should therefore be very quick and easy to answer.

Method of Webinars

Thanks to the ever-improving webinar systems, very different methods can also be used in webinars. Realistically, however, one has to admit that classic frontal teaching dominates here, often supplemented by the possibility of asking questions or having a short discussion. In order to maintain the concentration and motivation of the participants, the webinar must therefore be designed to be particularly interesting.

Even though video conferencing is suddenly becoming more and more of a habit due to the new home office reality, many webinars still take place without video, or only with the video of the lecturer, which is often only displayed in small format next to a presentation. Gestures and facial expressions both to support the explanations and as comprehension feedback to the lecturer are therefore partially or completely omitted. This makes a clear explanation even more important for the lecturer.

Technology of the Webinars

Of course, we must not forget the technical component that suddenly makes up such a large part of our learning experience. The almost obligatory questions “Hear me” and “See my screen” at the beginning of a webinar make this particularly clear. As part of the evaluation, it is therefore essential to record whether the participants are familiar with the Technology have come to terms with it.

Precisely because of the uncertainty caused by the technology in many participants, there are high demands on the Organization of the webinar. When will I receive the access link? How big can/should the group be? How do I receive documents afterwards? These are just some of the questions from webinar attendees.

These special features should be supplemented in the evaluation of a webinar by questions about the Result for the participants. Of course, this is only to be seen as a preliminary result, because even in a webinar you should take the Transfer of what they have learned, but this can only be done with a time delay when the participants have really had time and opportunity to implement the content. As a pragmatic solution, the transfer of several webinars can also be recorded in a time-shifted survey, whereby it is no longer necessary to distinguish between webinars and face-to-face training when evaluating the transfer.

The evaluation of a webinar should also be concluded with an open-ended question in order to give the participants the opportunity to make suggestions for improvement and to accommodate points that were not addressed individually due to the efficiency of the questionnaire.

In order to make it easier for you to evaluate webinars, we have decided not only to make our sample questionnaire available to our customers in the system, but also to release it here in the blog. You can use this download here as PDF.

The questionnaire is based on our proven combination of research results and everyday pragmatism in working with our customers.