Idea 24: Run a webinar (2 mins)
Every day during September we will post up an idea for you to vote on. The most popular ideas will become the things that the inaugural Organizing Committee of the Critical Physiotherapy Network focuses on in 2015. So please make sure you cast your vote at the bottom of each post.
Webinars have become quite popular as a way for people around the world to connect together and 'attend' a course, lecture or conference in real time, and participate in some professional development. The attraction of webinars - particularly if they are recorded to be played back later - is that they bring people together without all the costs of travel and disruption that international conferences and study programmes normally imply. The biggest downsides are normally people's discomfort or difficulties with the technology, and the time differences between the country of delivery and reception, but these things aside, they are a fantastic new way of sharing ideas and disseminating learning.
MOOCs - or massive open online courses - are one version of the webinar that has been used by some leading educational providers around the world to deliver relatively generic content to absolutely massive numbers of people. These can be more about content delivery than interaction - simply because of the size of the classes involved - but they still provide a chance to hear internationally renowned speakers, sometimes for free, in ways that wouldn't have been possible before.
Webinars could bring Barbara Gibson, John Hammond or Gunn Engelsrud into your home or office and all you would have to do is learn how to set up the software, so shouldn't this be something that we invest in?
Post update: please note that voting closed on 7 October 2014 (results are available here), but please feel free to post your comments in the space below.