Good news for those who have been hesitant to commit to fifteen hours of PCT webinars

Hello loyal readers.  I had received quite a few inquiries from readers who saw what I posted about this series of fifteen webinars about the Patent Cooperation Treaty, and who were not sure they could commit to attending all fifteen sessions.  Here is some good news about this. 

By way of background, I guess part of what is going on here is that back in the world before Covid, sometimes we actually conducted classes by sitting the same room together.  I can barely recall what life was like before Covid, but yes I do have dim recollections of many dozens of times, years ago, that I would get on an airplane and go somewhere to teach a class about the Patent Cooperation Treaty.  Maybe you likewise have some dim recollections about what your life was like before Covid, and maybe you, too, have some memory of having occasionally sat in a meeting room for a day or more to learn something.  

As I say, I can barely recall it.

I know from looking in old diaries and calendars that sometimes the class was one day long.  Sometimes the class was two days long.  Sometimes the class was 2½ days long.   Indeed I became a lifetime million mile flyer on United Airlines from teaching such PCT classes, and I became a lifetime platinum member of the Marriott hotel loyalty program from teaching such classes.

And then Covid happened.

And the question that came up was, how in the world do you teach eight hours or sixteen hours of material by means of webinars?

Do you ask your attendees to sit in front of their computers for a whole day?

Do you ask your attendees to sit in front of their computers for two whole days?

My sense of things was that probably it was just not realistic to ask you, dear reader, to commit to sitting in front of your computer, to listen to me presenting eight hours of material about the Patent Cooperation Treaty, over the span of a single entire day.  

Even if you were given a lunch break, it seemed to me there was no way that something like this would ever work.  Even if there were also a morning break and and afternoon break for trips to the bathroom, it seemed to me that there was no way that something like this would ever work.

Likewise it seemed to me that it was completely out of the question to ask you, dear reader, to commit to sitting in front of your computer, to listen to me presenting sixteen hours of material about the Patent Cooperation Treaty, over the span of two entire consecutive days.

(Maybe you feel differently about this, in which case please post a comment below!)

So what sort of popped into my head was, let’s just break up our fifteen or so hours of material into fifteen separate webinars of about an hour each.  Let’s do the webinars at a spacing of about every two days, and keep going for week after week until we have gotten through all of our webinars.  That was what popped into my head, and as you now can see that is the grand experiment that we will try, that starts on Tuesday, February 8, 2022.  (And concludes on Friday, March 18, 2022.)

Underlying all of this is the plain fact that this PCT material is largely cumulative.  The stuff that I talk about at hour number ten only makes sense if people have been sitting there hearing me talk about things at hour number two and hour number six.  Another way to describe this is that one part of the teaching material will be a prerequisite for another part of the teaching material.  

But also part of life is that it is a rare attendee who can absolutely commit to locking in all fifteen of our scheduled sessions into their own personal schedule.  I have to imagine that for most of our attendees, what would surely happen is that they would start loading the sessions into their personal calendar and they would find that there is already a trip to the dentist in their calendar during one of the time slots.  Or some long-planned client conference call.  Or a family activity that cannot be rescheduled.

So with all of this background in place, here is the good news that I mentioned.  You will see these words which have been added to the online brochure for this series of webinars:

Each session’s recording and presentation materials will be available on-demand to all registrants.

Yes, the very nice folks who are organizing the webinar hosting system will be organizing a raw video recording of each session.  They will set it up so that the raw video recording will be available on demand, shortly after each session has completed.

So for example suppose you find that you are going to miss session number 2.  The good news here is that shortly after session 2 has finished, you will be able to click on a special page and watch the recording of session 2.  This will hopefully allow you to more or less make up what you missed, during the day or so before session 3 comes around.  And then hopefully you can be ready for the live session 3.

Later our plan will be to edit each of the raw video recordings into a polished recording.  And later we plan to make the polished recordings available all in one place, for later binge watching by those who completely missed the live webinar series.  Wow, I cannot think of anything more fun than binge watching fifteen hours of lectures about the Patent Cooperation Treaty.  Maybe you can think of something more fun than that, and if so, please post a comment below.

But anyway, I hope you can join me in thinking of this as a sort of grand experiment in teaching two full days’ worth of pretty difficult and admittedly somewhat dry subject matter, that would normally be taught in person, and teaching it in a Covid world, spread out over many weeks.  I must confess to you the dear reader that I have never in my life taught anything in this kind of schedule, over this many webinars, spread out over such a long period of so many days and weeks.  And I have to assume that for you, my dear reader, you have surely never been on the receiving end of a teaching effort that is organized in this way.  It is indeed a grand experiment and it will be quite an adventure to see how it goes.