According to Community Brands’ recently published research study, 89 percent of learners who are interacting with their professional development organizations much more now than before the pandemic have found online continuing education as a very helpful channel in the last year. This interest in virtual engagement is expected to stick around, as members who previously engaged more or entirely in-person plan to have a greater balance between in-person engagement and online engagement after the pandemic.
With this anticipated shift in the continuing education space and beyond, utilizing a learning management system (LMS) that can flawlessly deliver programs with a choice in medium will be key to meeting varied learner preferences moving forward. However, offering a variety of education formats can be a tall order to fulfill.
Leveraging an LMS that is specialized to deliver rebroadcasts is a growing tactic employed by continuing education professionals looking to beef up their live online event calendar. A rebroadcast is a scheduled replay of a previously recorded event that includes interactivity elements of a live program.
Incorporating rebroadcasts into your continuing education strategy comes with some worthwhile benefits:
- Extending the life of your content. Whether the content was originally a webinar or a presentation captured from an in-person event, hosting a rebroadcast allows you to reach more learners with a repurposed program.
- Meeting varied requirements. For certain industries with continuing education requirements, there can be rules as to how many hours a learner can receive live vs. on-demand. By incorporating elements of interactivity and attendance tracking into a rebroadcast you can meet the requirement for a live event, allowing you to offer more learning options without having to produce new content.
- Offering flexibility. Rebroadcasts allow you to schedule multiple airings of popular programs to meet the needs of varied time zones and give your learners expanded options. Also, scheduling rebroadcasts for slower times of year, when your live online event calendar is light, is an effective tactic to maintain your place as a go-to source of education all year round.
- Delivery reliability. Many subject matter experts are delivering content from home where internet connections can be unreliable. With rebroadcasts you are limiting the opportunity for live speaker technical difficulties. On the day of your rebroadcast, you have a guarantee that the content is already captured and ready to stream.
- Ease of production. By using the recordings available within your LMS, rebroadcasts become a low-burden deliverable for your team as they don’t require additional content curation. You can simply select the program from your library to replay.
Education professionals may have concerns that a rebroadcast will not be as effective as a live course, but here are some key best practices to ensure the replay is as impactful as the original programming:
- Incorporate interactivity. Rebroadcasts should incorporate the same engagement options as your live event, including access to the speaker. Invite your speaker to participate in the attendee chat so they can engage with learners throughout their presentation. As a speaker, this can be a refreshing experience as you are able to focus on answering questions and sparking conversation while your course is airing, which can be difficult to do while presenting live. The chat also offers opportunities for attendees to learn from one another and share best practices on the topic at hand. You can also incorporate additional engagement elements such as polling to make the rebroadcast a more communal experience. Quizzing and checkpoints can be leveraged to track content retention and attendance.
- Package new content. Your rebroadcast does not have to be a replay of a singular event, you can take segments from a variety of original programming and put together a new package to rebroadcast. Consider building a “best of” rebroadcast that incorporates perspectives from a variety of speakers and courses into one new offering.
- Fill up the airtime. Use the time before the rebroadcast begins to air a pre-roll video that can reinforce your brand, advertise other education offerings, or promote future events. Including additional resources as downloadable materials for learners to reference during breaks can also add value for the learner.
- Leverage with virtual conferences. Virtual conferences have exploded this year as industries have shifted their in-person events online. Converting a large in-person conference with concurrent sessions can be difficult to coordinate. By weaving in rebroadcasts, you can ease the burden on event day for your staff. Consider hosting the plenary session live while the breakouts are replays. Offering your sponsors the opportunity to pre-record a demo or commercial that you can rebroadcast as a lunch and learn or to kick off a breakout session can also be a value add for partners.
- Make it scalable. Finding a learning management system or content delivery platform with the built-in infrastructure that allows you to easily schedule rebroadcasts is crucial to efficiently delivering this type of medium. Look for a platform that allows you to replay content that was captured both inside and outside their system. Also, the replay should launch automatically so your team does not have to trigger the content to play, and they can instead focus on stoking engagement among learners.
When delivered effectively rebroadcasts can be a powerful educational tool to incorporate into a comprehensive continuing education strategy. With a robust LMS that supports dynamic and engaging rebroadcast delivery, your team is empowered to reach more learners without putting a strain on resources.