Webinars

Webinars are web-hosted alternatives to seminars. The principle is simple - if you can't get your audience together in one room, run the whole thing via a web page.

The service is typically provided by a specialist (sometimes for free) and you can host a piece of their software in your web page. This software is acts in a very similar fashion to a chat window. The user enters their question of comment in a field at the bottom and sees the questions and responses of other contributors scroll in real time in another window.

Typically you would publish the webinar URL and start time to your audience. When it kicks off the users browse to the webinar page and watch the comments live, contributing their own questions.

The webinar host can choose which user questions are published, and time this so that questions appear with suitable responses.

Some webinar software allows instant polls to pop up during the webinar session, allowing you to gain snapshots of opinions amongst your audience.

As well as text questions and answers, the session can show pictures, play audio and show videos.

Webinars can be used in a variety of ways: