Media professionals, from freelance writers to television producers to marketing managers, have long relied on the website Mediabistro for information, career advice, conferences, and job listings related to their lines of work. While comprehensive, those resources aren't always enough to keep a serious media professional at the top of her game. To fill in the gap, Mediabistro runs its own series of courses, including the online selection of Mediabistro Online Courses and Seminars (from $179; prices vary by course). Mediabistro also offers occasional face-to-face classes in New York, but this review focuses on its online options.

Mediabistro’s healthy course catalogue covers a wide range of topics, such as writing, editing and copyediting, public relations, as well as plenty of classes geared at specific areas of new media, like social networking, script-writing, blogging, and mobile marketing. While the majority of Mediabistro’s classes could be classified as "humanities," a few classes—very few—are more technical, such as an Adobe InDesign ($699 direct, 4.5 stars) course and one that teaches basic HTML and CSS—and both those courses still cover "publishing," just from the creation end. For truly technical learning, Lynda.com(from $25 per month, 4 stars) offers much more bang for your buck, although its courses come in the form of pre-recorded videos. 

Most Mediabistro classes have a live instructor (a handful are non-interactive online courses), question-and-answer sessions, conversation, and the added benefit of networking with real people in your field. With Lynda.com, you get supremely high quality technical know-how, but none of those other benefits. However, once you're a Lynda.com member, the site opens its entire learning vault to you, letting you learn as much as you like in any field. You get access to everything. Mediabistro, on the other hand, charges several hundred dollars for one course.

Inside a Mediabistro Course

 To get a feel for Mediabistro's courses, I enrolled in two: Social Media Marketing Boot Camp ($499, 8 weeks) and Blogging ($350, 4 weeks), designed to help both beginner bloggers and more seasoned experts who blog either professionally of for personal reasons. The boot camp consisted of weekly webinars with a large number of attendees, while Blogging was a smaller and more intimate class of about 15 students, and a weekly meeting via chat. Both courses also had assigned readings and homework, which learners completed at their own pace.

All the readings, chat histories, videos recordings of webinars (in case you missed them), forum for ongoing conversations, and other course content is stored in an online classroom, built on Moodle, a well-known and reliable learning-management platform. When you sign up for a course, Mediabistro gives you a username and password. If you're enrolled in more than one class, you only need one log-in, as the other courses will appear in your list once you're a confirmed student.

Networking is one of the primary reasons people take career-development courses. The Blogging course, as with other seminar-style Mediabistro courses, has a cap on the number of students who can enroll, which increases the opportunity for students to get to know one another. In the larger Social Media Marketing Boot Camp that I took, participants were divided into smaller homework groups, so the ability to network was still intrinsic to the course design.

Course Format

The major difference between the two classes I took was how the weekly lessons were taught. The boot camp had a rotating cast of guest lecturers, two per week, who each gave their own presentation. Week to week, the course was non-sequential. The presentations were video-based and hosted through Adobe Connect (4.5 stars), which includes a chat box where audience members can converse, as our mics were muted throughout. Another chat box, controlled by a moderator, allowed participants to type questions to be submitted to the speaker at the end of the talk during a Q&A session.

The format of  Blogging course was totally different. Students logged into the learning management portal each week and read a PDF. The PDF contained a lesson as well as an assignment. Throughout the week, we were to work on the assignment and post to a forum when the homework was completed or if we had questions or wanted to discuss something further. Typically, the assignments were to update or revise our blogs in some way. Other students visited our blogs to see our work, and we discussed our progress on the forums. Then, once a week, the instructor hosted a one-hour instant-message chat using a program that was also built into the learning management system. The chat was the only synchronous element of the course.

Although PDFs, an asynchronous forum, and instant-messaging isn't exactly cutting-edge technology, the upside is that the Internet speed required to participate is fairly low. Some of the other learners I met in the classes were from rural areas or countries where Internet connectivity could be spotty. Undoubtedly, these people got all the interaction they could handle, technically speaking.

Content: Blogging Course

One of the things I had hoped for in the Blogging course was a live weekly webinar, taught by the instructor, with her lecture or lesson plan as the core material, and room for discussion, questions, and other kinds of participation. What I got instead was a stack of PDFs. I suppose the benefit of having PDFs is that students can download and read them at any time. You can work through the material at your own pace and refer back to the material even after the class has ended. But there's no reason a class shouldn't have both! Static PDFs on their own are uninspiring, as far as I’m concerned.

But not everyone felt that way. Another student from the class who has taken seven Mediabistro Online Courses, told me that the "written content is the outstanding characteristic of all the classes" and not just because you can save documents locally and read them later, "but because they're written by outstanding people." If you value written material highly and don't mind the lack of live instruction, Mediabistro classes won't disappoint you.

I still stand by my opinion that the course should have both PDFs and live instruction. It's too expensive a course to not have an instructor delivering her material. Fortunately, the weekly text-chat meeting boosted the level of interaction a little, although having chat without voice limits how much ground you can cover in an hour.

Of the two courses I took, which are not necessarily representative of other Mediabistro Online Courses in content, the Blogging one held my attention more, despite the drawbacks I found with the chat and lack of webinar for two reasons: 1) the material was sequential and 2) the class size was small enough that I got to know a few of the other students.

Sequential material (in which one lesson builds upon the last), to me, is what differentiates a class from a conference. You can learn a lot at a conference, but the talks and keynotes are not designed to build on one another. In a course—or my idea of a good course anyway—you learn concepts and knowledge that build upon each other. Theoretically, you shouldn't be able complete the third assignment well if you haven't done assignments one and two. The Blogging course had sequential material.

During week one, we learned about different kinds of blogs (i.e., business versus personal) and why profile pages are important. The assignment was to write ten posts and create (or update) our profile page. Week two discussed the content of posts, where to find ideas for news posts, and what "reach" means—the assignment was to write a few posts using what we learned about where to find ideas. In week three, we learned about search engine optimization. Our assignment was to rewrite some of our posts to be more SEO friendly. Everything new built on what came before it.

The quality of the material was good but a little generic. And some of articles suggested for further reading were a few years out of date. What made the class work anyway were the students.

Students had mixed levels of competency and skill. A few blogged professionally, others blogged more casually, and two or three were first-timers. By week two of the four-week course, people largely paired off according to their experience levels.  The professionals spent more time commenting on the work of the other professionals, and the experienced bloggers doing the same with their kin. The freshmen weren't left in the dust by any means, as the instructor and a few of the more tech-savvy people would drop in on their forum posts to make sure their questions were being answered.

Chats meetings occurred every Wednesday night for one hour and were largely unstructured, which I found disappointing. They were treated as open Q&A sessions. I asked fellow blog classmate Emily Carter (who launched the blog Lone Star Cats during the course) whether this was typical, based on her experience taking more than half a dozen other Mediabistro courses. She said the open chat structure and activity level were average, although the instructor, Melanie Nayer, was above par. Carter mentioned, too, that in another class (Reinventing Print Content for the Web), the instructor drove the chat and provided a structured discussion, which was the best Mediabistro chat experience she's had.

The most useful material of the Mediabistro Blogging online course, for me, came from my peers via the forum. It wasn't in the PDF lectures, and it didn't happen during the chats. It was learning from the other bloggers and the resulting networking. Since the course ended, I've already corresponded with two other participants somewhat regularly to help them solve issues they've had with their blogs. Likewise, they continue to give me feedback.

Content: Social Media Marketing Boot Camp

As I mentioned, the Mediabistro's Social Media Marketing Boot Camp was extremely different from the Blogging course, feeling more like a conference than a class (in fact, it is technically billed as a "conference," although that wasn't immediately clear to me). The webinars featured two guest speakers each week who gave separate, hour-long presentations. The sessions were all live. The speaker appeared on a video feed, while another box contained his or her slideshow presentation. Another box was reserved for audience members to text-chat with one another during the talks, adding a layer of interaction.

I assume that most of participants who enrolled were supported by their employers, or were self-employed, because the sessions took place on weekdays during U.S. business hours. The time slot is excellent for these people who don't have to work off the clock to learn. For me, as someone auditing the course and multitasking while it was occurring, it was tough to focus week after week during the two-hour midday block.

It was also tough to pay attention week after week because not all the speakers presented material that was relevant to me and what I wanted to learn. Because the talks were non-sequential, it didn't matter if I day-dreamed through one, or skipped one or two of them entirely.

The quality of the talks exceeded my expectations. Even with "boot camp" in the name, suggesting a getting-started crash-course, the class hosted very high-level speakers, including Guy Kawasaki and Shel Israel, who ventured deeply into social media, without much beginner-level preamble. Many of the speakers presumed the audience had a decent base knowledge about social media, and when they didn't, they asked their peers to explain it to them in the online text-chat that ran alongside the presentation. The chats were extremely active, sometimes serving more as a peanut gallery for hoots and hollers, but never ever dull. Likewise, the online forum, where people continued discussions throughout the week, overflowed with comments, questions, answers, and other kinds of information-sharing about social media from a variety of angles: technical ("Which tools should I use to do X?"), business ("What is the business value or return for doing Y?"), and social ("Share photos. Always smile in photos.").

One value-add for Mediabistro's boot camp is that all the presentations were recorded, and students can watch the full video lectures through the online learning system after they've occurred. If you miss a presentation due to scheduling conflicts, you can watch it later. Students have access to the online system for about two weeks after the class officially ends as well, a huge perk of Mediabistro online courses. (In the Blogging course, the chat histories were recorded and saved to the online system, and those students also had access to all the material for about two weeks after the course ended.)

Is a Mediabistro Class Worth the Money?

As with any class, whether you reap the full value of Mediabistro's Online Courses and Seminars is in part contingent on your level of self-motivation. In a best possible case, the courses give you hands-on experience, ample resources, including expert knowledge from the instructor or lecturers, and connections. It helps when the instructor is suited to teaching in an online environment, and it's even better when the other students are committed to participating fully, reading directions and following instructions, and sharing their experiences and knowledge. 

Let's not beat around the bush: several hundred dollars is a lot of money for a course. In gauging that range and trying to determine just how expensive it really is, I kept returning to the prices of conferences, which currently fall in that same ballpark. The Social Media Marketing Boot Camp was a conference, with homework groups functioning like break-out sessions and some of the lectures even being billed as keynote speeches. If you think of them like conferences, the boot camp courses are well worth the money, seeing as you don't have to pay for travel and the content is spread out over several weeks, rather than running back-to-back for three days straight.

As for the smaller and more class-like offerings from Mediabistro, it's really a matter of whether the course being offered fits exactly what you want to learn. Close is no cigar. The Blogging class won't help you become a better writer—only a better (or more educated) blogger. The course titles specifically name what courses cover, so it's not too hard to match up your needs to what's available. If you don't see a course title that indicates exactly what you're looking to learn, don't enroll. And if you do enroll in a course that isn't quite what you expected, reach out to the folks at Mediabistro, who are highly professional and provide excellent customer service.

More Educational Software Reviews: