In COVID times – Everyone is either selling SANITIZERS or doing WEBINARS

With lock down somethings came to the fore front of our attention. We needed to sanitize our hands often and that meant we needed sanitizers…. a lot of them. This meant the sanitizers went off the shelves in a jiffy. Everybody was looking for them, Officers needed them, buildings needed them, societies needed them, grocery stores etc etc.

This meant there was a demand and that demand needed immediate fulfilment. A lot of people saw the opportunity and they became sanitizer traders and when I was looking the sanitizers for my society I came across a lot of substandard products. This was a herd movement in our society which escalated the demands of sanitizers so much that even substandard products were selling at a premium.

Something similar happened in the education space as well, here the beast had several names

ONLINE TRAINING, WEBINAR to name a couple. Trainers were CRASH COURSED (I don’t know if it is the right term) to be the black belt of the ONLINE AVATAR of their otherwise mundane INSTRUCTOR LEAD TRAINING. A lot of aspects were assumed

1-     Everybody is internet savvy

2-     Everybody has a good laptop or worse, that any device would do. (they made the same mistake as IMO, when IMO decided on the screen size of an ECDIS screen in the performance standards).

3-     The whole country has fantastic internet connectivity

4-     People at home will have enough privacy to attend sessions.

We are still struggling to define parameters on “Learning Effectiveness” of classic learning methods, now we have launched some thing new on full scale without even considering Beta testing.

Even the schools have started online classes, but what beats me is, they are also having it for class 1 students. My son is in class 1 and only relationship with computer or TAB he has is of playing games or watching his cartoons. But unfortunately, the teachers are teaching him online in the same way that they would have done in the class, CHANGE OF MEDIUM for the school is irrelevant.

You just can’t achieve attention of a five-year-old who is in his home (his den) with classic teaching vide an online platform.

I am a great fan for online training, but I do not think every trainer has the repertoire with him to make it effective. This will require a lot more thought, practice and out of the box thinking.

Webinar or Online training overdose is surely a quicksand we are getting sucked into.