A Little Attention to Instructional Design will Vastly Improve your Webinars
A focused and well deigned PowerPoint deck is good, but hardly sufficient to keep an audience interested and motivated during a Webinar. Most Webinars , especially those designed for training, would benefit from some basic instructional design principles. 
The first thing you need to pay attention to is create your overall goal for the session.Make sure you select content by taking into account the purpose of the presentation and attending to time/space constraints and audience. Try matching content with delivery strategies, such as storytelling, characterization, worked examples and so on and so forth. Read up on Web and document design which includes the use of correct Web colors, fonts, use of white space to ensure learning. If you are trying to use your Webinars to train you need to take time to set some objectives for each lesson and be sure the content is divided up into manageable chunks. And for most Webinars you will want add some interactivity such as poles and quizzes to be sure your viewers are actually meeting those instructional objectives.
It took me two years and a Masters Degree in Instructional Design to learn to to use these principles well but you can pick up a lot of good techniques by Googling “e-learning” or “Instructional Design” then really paying attention to how these principles are used in some of the better Webinars you have attended.
Best,
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15 December 2008, 12:25 am
Michelle,
This is so true. Great topic thanks for posting it.