While webinars have become popular in the corporate world, they are starting to branch out to other places – namely the education world.

 

According to Infinite Conferencing, many colleges and universities find webinars advantageous for various initiatives.

 

“Our college and university clients use webinars as a way of reaching prospective students and alumni who are geographically diverse, and working students whose tight schedules permit them from being able to attend workshops or seminars in person,” says Julie Glazer, senior account executive for Infinite Conferencing.

 

A webinar – short for Web-based seminar – is a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar transmitted over the Web. A key feature of the webinar is its interactive elements – the ability to give, receive and discuss information. This is contrary to a webcast, in which the data transmission is one way and doesn’t allow for interaction.

 

Infinite Conferencing says some university human resource departments conduct webinars to reach retired employees. In addition, schools of medicine use them to communicate with students doing residencies.

 

An associate director of a career management center for a major university, which uses webinars to reach alumni and working professionals in the MBA program, recently spoke to Infinite Conferencing. His name was not released.

 

“We wanted to become relevant to groups that we weren’t able to reach through our on-site workshops,” the director said. “We have a huge online MBA program, and we also have a large number of students that work full-time and attend classes in the evenings, so in order to meet the needs of these groups we had to look into an alternative method of delivering our career management services.”

 

The career management center’s webinars teach students and alumni how to use resources in the center, and offer instruction and lessons on the critical issues of career management – networking, resume and cover letter writing and branding.

 

The director reports that since introducing webinars two years ago, he’s better able to meet the more specific needs of different populations. And, the school can offer recordings of those webinars. “We always record our webinars so that if somebody misses it, which is inevitable with a population of working professionals, they can just go to the Web site to view it,” he said.

 

The associate director leads the webinars himself and says that learning to navigate Infinite Conferencing’s system was easy. In fact, his biggest challenge has been content and marketing.

 

“Because information is so readily available today, our challenge is to deliver valuable content and make students and alumni aware that it’s there for them,” he said.

 

Infinite Conferencing is a provider of solutions for virtual meeting and events. More than 2,000 companies, non-profits and agencies use their phone and web conferencing, web casting and webinar services. As a source of audio conferencing services, the company provides everything from automated, reservationless phone conferencing to fully operator-assisted teleconferencing.
 

For more on Infinite Conferencing’s Event Management Services, or for a no-cost quote on management of an upcoming company event, call 888.203.7900, or log onto http://www.infiniteconferencing.com/virtual-event-management.asp.