Trying to keep my eyes open during that three-hour webinar

When you realize the meeting link is actually a test of patience

I sat down at my desk last Tuesday with a cup of coffee that had already gone slightly cold. I had signed up for this webinar about AI digital classroom integration because my department head kept dropping hints that we needed to be more ‘digitally literate.’ The email said it would be an hour-long session, but when I finally logged in through that browser-based platform—which seemed to take forever to load the audio drivers—it became clear that it was going to be one of those afternoon-consuming events. The host started by showing a slide deck that looked like it hadn’t been updated since 2015, and the audio kept cutting in and out, creating that metallic, robotic echo you only get when someone doesn’t know how to set up their microphone levels properly.

The technical mess in the chat window

It wasn’t just the presentation that was struggling. The chat sidebar was a chaotic mess of people asking, ‘Can you hear me?’ and ‘Is there a recording for this?’ every thirty seconds. One participant, who clearly hadn’t muted their mic, was clattering around in their kitchen. You could hear the unmistakable sound of a kettle whistling in the background. It made me think about the time I had to manage a similar setup for a small workshop last year. I spent about 150 dollars on a decent external condenser microphone just to avoid sounding like I was trapped in a wind tunnel, but even then, people still struggled to figure out how to join the stream. Watching this webinar host struggle with screen sharing while forty people watched his desktop icons just felt like a collective waste of time.

Why I stayed until the bitter end

I really don’t know why I didn’t just close the tab. Maybe it was a lingering sense of duty, or maybe I was just too lazy to get up and start my actual work. By the second hour, the presenter had pivoted to showing a demo of a new e-learning portal. He was clicking through menus way too quickly, and half the time, the software lagged so badly that his cursor would jump across the screen like it was possessed. It’s funny, I’ve seen similar training sessions for TOEFL writing or even local forest management discussions online, and they all seem to share this same awkward energy. It’s like we’ve all agreed that if we just stare at a screen long enough, knowledge will somehow osmose into our brains.

The lingering question of effectiveness

When it finally wrapped up—around 4:30 PM, leaving me with almost zero time to finish my report for the next day—I felt more exhausted than if I had actually been teaching a class. I looked at the follow-up email that had already hit my inbox, asking for feedback on whether the webinar was ‘helpful.’ I clicked ‘no’ on the engagement survey, which probably won’t matter to anyone, but it felt right. Is this really the best way for us to learn new skills? Just sitting in a dark room, watching someone struggle with bandwidth issues? I keep thinking about how much easier it would have been to just read a PDF, but I guess that doesn’t count as ‘active participation’ for the training credits. I’m still not sure if I actually learned anything about AI or if I just learned how to tolerate bad video streaming for three hours straight.