Master the Production of Virtual Events and Improve Engagement
Have you ever found yourself confidently delivering content for a virtual training session, webinar, or online meeting only to have a participant drop off? Or, have you bravely launched breakout sessions but found that participants got lost on where to go? These scenarios illustrate the convergence of virtual session facilitation and production. While attention is most often paid to the facilitation of virtual sessions, significantly less is devoted to producing them. Producing Virtual Training, Meetings, and Webinars rectifies this gap.
In this book, Kassy LaBorie, go-to training expert and co-author of Interact and Engage! 50 Activities for Virtual Training, Meeting, and Webinars, guides you through the production knowledge and skills a trainer needs to master the production of virtual events while delivering engaging training, productive meetings, and captivating webinars—from how to prepare the technology and content beforehand to how to run everything smoothly. Using examples from and discussing differences among common virtual conferencing platforms such as Adobe Connect, Blackboard, Zoom, Webex, GoTo suite, and Microsoft Teams, LaBorie offers a plan of action for conquering just about any platform and troubleshooting potential problems. This book thoroughly examines typical platform features (audio, webcam, chat, screen share), advanced interaction methods (polling, breakouts, Q&A), and administration and logistics elements (logins, session scheduling, reports).
With production in mind, you’ll also learn how to:
- Design session materials.
- Prepare attendees to participate before and during the session.
- Build successful virtual working relationships with presenters.
Through stories, templates, checklists, and examples, LaBorie shares about her 20-plus years of engaging participants successfully in thousands of virtual events and gets you up to speed in no time.
Kassy LaBorie is the principal consultant at Kassy LaBorie Consulting. She is a speaker, instructional designer, classroom facilitator, and author who specializes in virtual learning, teams, and live online technology. Kassy is passionate about helping organizations, learning teams, and training professionals successfully move to the virtual environment.
In her previous role at Dale Carnegie Training, she was the director of virtual training services, a consultancy that partners with organizations to help them develop successful online training strategies. Kassy also served as the product design architect responsible for developing the company's live online training product and experience. Prior to this, she was an independent master virtual trainer, a Microsoft software trainer, and a senior trainer at WebEx, where she helped build and deliver training at the WebEx University.
Kassy is the co-author of Interact and Engage! 50+ Activities for Virtual Training, Meetings, and Webinars. A frequent speaker at industry conferences since 2006, she has presented at Training Magazine events including their yearly conference and Online Learning Conferences, Chief Learning Officer symposiums, The Virtual Learning Show, ATD's TechKnowledge and International Conference & Exposition, as well as many local ATD chapter events.
