Forestry and Natural Resources Webinar Series

The Forestry & Natural Resources Webinar series is a service of the Southern Regional Extension Forestry Office, North Carolina State University's Extension Forest Resources, and Texas AgriLife Extension Service (hereby listed as the project team). The series was designed and developed to addresses the professional development needs of natural resource professionals in the public and private sector. The Project Team has a proven record of extending information through professionally designed and delivered webinars using innovative web technologies (http://www.forestrywebinars.net) and collaborating with others from both public and private sectors. In just a little over two years, the Project Team has conducted over 50 webinars, ranging in topic from absentee forest landowners to who owns America's forest, targeting natural resource professionals and landowners. These webinars range in length from 1 to 1.5 hours and often offer continuing education units. The Project Team collaborates with subject area experts across disciplines and job sectors to obtain presenters. Presenters have ranged from researchers with the US Forest Service to Extension specialists, to Landowners engaged in intergenerational land transfers.

The series is delivered through the Forestry and Natural Resources Webinar Portal (http://www.forestrywebinars.net). The portal includes a content management system (CMS) where the Project Team manages all aspects of developing and delivering the webinar series to include marketing materials, pre surveys, moderating, post evaluations, quizzes, and continuing education units. The webinar portal and the 50 plus webinars have been developed with less than $20,000 in direct financial support. In-kind services (use of computer programming, faculty and staff time from the three key Project Team member institutions and volunteered webinar speaker time) have been substantially more and are estimated at over $100,000. Each webinar includes an evaluation that aims to measures a participant’s knowledge, attitude, and aspirations. The Team has successfully reached over 5100 new and returning participants.

Webinars achievements by the numbers.

• · 51 – Number of webinars conducted
• · 5129 – Number of new and returning participants in live webinars
• · 3 – Number of nations reached (United States, Canada, and Chile)
• · 28.8% – Percent gain in knowledge participants indicate achieving
• · 83.3% – Percent of participants planning some form of follow up action related to the information gained.
• · 21,549,784 – Number of acres that will be impacted by participants willing to adopt the information learned.
• · $10,541,329 – The total economic value participants placed on the webinars
• · 150,000+ – The estimated number of continuing education units awarded

While our webinars are designed and delivered to live audiences, by archiving them we are able to provide professionals with some flexibility to obtain their continuing education credits. Archived webinars offer continuing education units up to 12 months from a live webinar.

Work loads, administrative demands and legislative edicts for cost containment and accountability are pressuring Extension to move beyond the traditional means of technology transfer to more technology-assisted means of information delivery. Webinars are not designed to replace other more traditional program delivery techniques such as face to face learning or workshops, but webinars are another tool that can be used to effectively reach audiences. Through the Project Team’s efforts the webinar series has resulted in the effective and efficient delivery of a professional development program that will ultimately lead to behavior change that benefits participants and society.

Files

Archived webinars

The webinar is on Shade Tree casualty Loss. This webinar was conducted in rapid response to the recent tornadoes in the mdiwest and southern US. http://obama.sref.info/www/webinars/webinars/webinars/how-to-claim-a-shade-tree-casualty-loss http://slms.delta.ncsu.edu/play_recording.html?recordingId=1261500882481_1305730175739