5. Approach for Effective Webinar Training Development

5.1. Webinar Best Practices

Webinars are widely used in industry and education, and there are many established best practices for conducting them. These best practices address not only what to do during a webinar but also before and after a webinar.

Examples of Webinar Best Practices
Examples of Webinar Best Practices
Before
  • Ask participants to review workbooks and copies of presentation slides.
  • Ask participants to submit questions before the webinar.
During
  • Inform participants about what they will learn.
  • Capture attention with an interesting story relevant to the topic.
After
  • Provide additional references on the webinar topic.
  • Allow questions following the webinar.

Participant engagement is a common characteristic of most webinar best practices. It is easy to see how some best practices engage participants, such as using chat and polling for interaction. However, some are less obvious. For example, how you structure your PowerPoint presentation can work for or against engagement. Although this course is not a webinar, it uses many strategies for presenting content to engage participants.  For example, the information above was presented in a table format to make it more engaging than a paragraph format would have been.