How to Produce Interactive Webinars on a Webcast Platform

Registration Gate

Some of my clients use webinars to deliver required training that results in professional development or continuing education credits for their participants. The Registration Gate (Figure 1, below) is a feature that allows me to collect the viewers’ names, email addresses, and several more selectable fields. I can then export a Lead report in a CSV spreadsheet format for my client.

Figure 1. The Registration Gate in the IBM Cloud Video platform

Unlike on some Flash-based webinar platforms, you cannot generate detailed viewing reports that show the exact time an attendee started and stopped viewing a webcast. The Registration Gate can be used in conjunction with a password field as well, which is typical for paid webcast courses.

Chat, Q&A Box, and Polls

The Chat (Figure 2, below) and Q&A interactivity features are displayed by default to the right of the video player. I use chat when we want to encourage interaction between the participants, moderators, and presenters. Moderators can delete any messages, restrict the number of messages per user to one per 30 seconds in Slow Mode, pause the room to temporarily stop all message flow from viewers only, or clear all of the messages in the chat room.

Figure 2. IBM Cloud Video’s Chat tab open on the right side of the video player

I don’t normally enable both Chat and Q&A at the same time, but if you do, then they become tabbed options for the viewer to navigate between. The Q&A feature allows individual viewers to ask questions and receive responses from the moderators. Moderators can change the settings so that viewers can see all questions, only approved questions, only questions that are answered, or a private mode where they only see their own questions. Most of my clients use private mode, which I find very useful for providing tech support to individual viewers.

One of the interesting options in the Q&A is to allow viewers to up-vote questions (Figure 3, below), although we haven’t incorporated this in a live webcast yet. As most of the webinars that I produce are hybrid events with an in-person and online audience, either a moderator or myself will read the question into a microphone for the presenter to respond to. Typically, the presenters only need to push their slides. I usually split their video signal and send one to the projector and the other to my video switcher.

Figure 3. In IBM Cloud Video’s Q&A tab, viewers can up-vote questions.

The Poll feature (Figure 4, below) needs a bit of work. It allows the producer to launch poll questions that appear on top of the viewers’ video player (Figure 5, below Figure 4).

Figure 4. Launching a poll

Figure 5. Polls pop up on top of the video player.

The producer can see the results of the polls and use the feedback to shape their presentation (Figure 6, below). I would love to be able to track the individual-viewer responses. This would enable me to use this feature throughout a webcast to verify attendance through quizzes, or simply to ask viewers to check in to make sure they are actually paying attention.

Figure 6. Poll results

The work-around to this current poll feature limitation is to use an online survey to verify attendance and administer quiz questions (Figure 7, below).

Figure 7. A poll launched from a remote console

Fortunately, the IBM Cloud Video platform allows me to provide external web links that can be used for this purpose. Unlike webinar platforms where I can update the page while live, however, any updates to the web links and the description section of the webcast channel page require the viewers to refresh their pages before they can see the change. The chat could be used to send links out if needed after you go live, provided this is enabled.

Summary

Producing interactive webinars on a webcast platform can provide a more stable viewing experience that requires less viewer tech support than producing webinars on Flash-based platforms. Webcast broadcast resolutions and frame rates conform to traditional broadcast standards, which makes recording and editing webcasts much easier. It’s possible to add features to webcasts that capture similar user data and provide viewer interactivity like those found on webinars, but some of the features may have limitations and may still require workarounds for effective use.