This free webinar takes a slightly different twist in the ongoing exploration of how to design highly interactive webinars and virtual meetings that keep people engaged. One of the biggest challenges facilitators and trainers face is the effect of participants multi-tasking on the productivity and creativity of the group. The first reaction is to think about how to STOP participants from multi-tasking so that they will focus on OUR agenda. But in this age of 24/7 information access and communication, wouldn’t it make more sense to design in productive multi-tasking, for example contributing ideas or responding to questions at the same time as we listen to a presentation? We call this Multi-tasking On Task. Register now for Friday December 17, our last webinar of the year.

We know that every successful meeting relies on a well-thought out objective, outcomes and agenda. And, good facilitation that engages participants in open, thoughtful thinking and learning But there are some especially gnarly challenges associated with meeting and collaborating remotely. We’ve created a conceptual structure to frame them for discussion called The Six Critical Success Factors.

Come join the evolving conversation! You will experience an interactive virtual event and help build solutions to one of the biggest challenges facing virtual teams today. Register here.

We received such enthusiastic feedback for our fall 2009 series that we are offering a new series of complimentary webinars where you, the participants, help build the agenda. Please join us Wednesday, February 10th or Thursday February 18th as we demonstrate eight principles for designing interactive webinars by engaging you as participants!

Are you spending too much time in ineffective virtual meetings and boring webinars?The one-way nature of most webinars and web conferences misses an opportunity to engage an audience and draw on the wisdom of the group.

The opportunity presented by a more interactive and collaborative approach to webinars and virtual meetings is to reclaim the many learning methods used in face-to-face workshops and adapt them for a virtual environment. The promise of interactive webinars is to increase learning, shorten meetings, promote greater participation with less multi-tasking and foster on-going collaboration. Ready to enroll? Click here.

There are two important reasons to design pre-work into your webinar, online conference or workshop. The first is to get your participants ready to take full advantage of the session by thinking ahead about the content, beginning to formulate ideas or getting to know the group. Participants who have completed well thought out pre-work are “primed” for active and open participation in the real-time event.

The second is to get you ready to facilitate the session effectively. By knowing more about your participants and their interests, you are in a position to develop focused questions that will stimulate ideas. In a virtual setting this becomes even more critical, as you typically have less time in which to achieve your meeting objectives and lack the visual cues that make it easier to adjust your course in mid-stream.

In the beginning the group felt out of their comfort zone. A previous web conference had been disappointing. Facilitating a workshop filled with attentive faces and sitting alone looking at a computer screen seemed like two different worlds. Technology was the solution but it also seemed to get in the way.

To explore the possibilities, we decided to follow the eight principles from my firm’s recent white paper, Designing Interactive Webinars.

We have just published a white paper entitled Designing Interactive Webinars to add to our webinar and article series on collaborative learning in the virtual workplace.

Here’s a summary of the four virtual learning strategies. I invite your comments on the full article available online at CLO Magazine August 2009 Feature Article.