So I've taught a few thousand activists/journalists in security over the years in person and a couple of hundred over remote webinars. I've also built online se

So I've taught a few thousand activists/journalists in security over the years in person and a couple of hundred over remote webinars. I've also built online self paced courses. My takeaway is that the biggest mistake educators make (and I was guilty of this at early stages) is trying to directly shift things like lessons plans from the physical to the online world. One way lecture style stuff which is kind of outdated (or occasionally just lazy) for many use cases in a physical classroom really fails for a lot of stuff when put online. To do it well, online courses have to be approached completely differently. You have to switch your way of thinking, switch how you apply learning (esp adult) methodologies, switch your time planning and also change your expectations. For example adults mostly learn and enjoy learning best through facilitation where possible, stuff like group work. That's very hard to do well with current online tools. Also attention spans are very different. Even small things like physical movement. In the training room you the educator can move around and in most sessions you can integrate opportunities to get the people you are training to stand up and move around for a bit (for example get a group to look at a problem and address it on the wall). You can't do that when someone is looking at a screen. Plus it's tricky to encourage people to feel able to spontaneously contribute or throw in a question etc on web. It's obviously also harder for more than one person to speak. Plus the way that people tend to be zeroed in on the educator means they are less likely to have positive engagement that spins off from what someone else is saying. E.g picking up follow up questions, asking their classmate how to do something or putting forward their own theory on something. There are some advantages to using webinars about what you can use - depending on topic you can draw on a wider variety of material. Overall when developing online courses I felt at times it shifted to require more of a Producer mentality than purely an Educator one.