Hi Mattie -- Could you provide some context? Are these webinars meant to be learning opportunities for the participants, or more a passive, sit-back-and-passively-absorb lecture-type thing?

I think it's important to go beyond just the training world. It's often more like producing a TV or Radio show. Look at what they teach in those arenas. For example, if you're just on audio, it's hard to adjust to the low amount of feedback from the audience. Having someone else in the room to talk with helps the pacing.

Teaching via a webinar is the same design process as an ILT, just a different medium. For an ILT you still consider what you're teaching, who your audience is, what other materials they've seen from you (consistency in look and feel) the best way to convey that content, and how they will receive that information. Same logic in a webinar.

My recommendation, just dive in, but test the heck out of whatever you create with peers. That's where you'll find where the "boredom" spots are, where you start to lose people, what information gets to be to long, etc. My bet is that whatever format you use for ILT has changed and morphed as you're used it in classes, the same will happen with webinars. What this also does it gets you familiar with the medium as the presenter. It is very different to sit in a room by yourself talking to people "out there" and it's easy to go real fast.

Not to make it more complicated and long winded, but it depends on what topic you're showing. As a rule of thumb, I prefer NOT doing webinars on topics like soft skills. They get to be very text heavy and conceptual, which is diffucult to graphically project in a webinar.

Things to consider, use multiple presenters to change up the voice attendees hear, use an 'interview' or 'role play' segment in your webinar, we use Go Live as well and the polling feature at least makes someone blink and move the mouse (sometimes it's the little things that can keep their attention), keep a format but don't be afraid to break that format if you have a text heavy presentation, and incorprate graphics as much as possible.