If you’ve been around the software industry for a little while, you’ve probably attended at least a few “webinars”, where someone does an online presentation, which you can watch and listen to in real time. You might be able to ask questions via a chat window, and if you’re lucky, the presenter will select your question to answer in the very limited time allocated for audience questions. If you can’t make it to the real-time presentation, you can watch a recording later, but you miss out on the Q&A.

The Mozilla Developer Engagement team is experimenting with a slightly different approach to presenting webinars. We’re decoupling the presentation part from the Q&A part. Instead of a real-time presentation with a little bit of Q&A, we’re publishing a screencast, and scheduling time for online chat about it later.

You can view the screencast on your own time, as much as you need to, and peruse and play with the code under discussion. Then, for those who have questions, the presenter will be on IRC during scheduled times to discuss them. You’ll also be able to chat with other participants, which usually isn’t possible in a typical webinar.

Here is the first in an intended series of pseudo-webinars: Christian Heilmann talking about syncing page content with HTML5 video.

The screencast

The chats

Discussion of this screencast will take place in the #mdnlearning channel on irc.mozilla.org at the following times:

• 10:00 UTC, Monday, 21 March
• 19:00 UTC, Monday, 21 March

If you don’t have an IRC client installed (such as the Chatzilla add-on for Firefox), you can access the #mdnlearning channel via this Mibbit widget.

We picked the times for the chat sessions to cover as many time zones as possible. We know they won’t be ideal for everybody. Please let us know in the comments how much lead time you’d like between publishing screencasts and the scheduled chats.

The code

The code that Chris demos in the screencast is available at https://github.com/codepo8/Syncing-Video.