New Insight for Corporate Training Webinars Addresses Collaborative Learning Issues

San Francisco, California - August 12, 2009 - Facilitate.com, an online meeting technology firm specializing in high-performance web meeting tools announced the publication of a framework to help corporate trainers and e-learning instructors successfully deliver interactive webinars. The eight principles outlined in the publication titled Designing Interactive Webinars lay the groundwork for creating virtual instructor led training with tools and techniques that support corporate trainers' desire to work in a collaborative online environment – a virtual classroom where the exchange of ideas and knowledge is real – regardless of time and distance.

A major issue for chief learning officers and directors of organizational development is that requirements for business training webinars are shifting from pushing information out with PowerPoint slides to pulling in ideas and knowledge through interactional collaboration on a level that mirrors the in-person classroom experience.

In her whitepaper, Designing Interactive Webinars, author Julia Young outlines eight principles that address the fact that management training is rapidly transitioning to a blended or totally virtual learning experience and trainers will need to keep it highly interactive and collaborative. The whitepaper builds on her article published in the August 2009 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine: Collaborative Learning in the Virtual Workplace. The CLO magazine article identifies four virtual online learning strategies that apply to leadership development, professional skills building and other types of learning that would traditionally be conducted in collaborative face-to-face workshop environment.

"As a facilitator who transitioned from face-to-face to online meetings many years ago," says Julia Young, Vice President of Facilitate.com, "I am excited to explore new ways to use the virtual learning space to engage more people, extend the reach of our learning methodologies, connect across cultures and organizational boundaries and build truly collaborative learning environments."

The free whitepaper draws on years of experience designing and facilitating effective online meetings. The firm's experience has been distilled into eight design principles that instructional designers, conference planners and facilitators can employ to create more effective business webinars, collaborative learning events, brainstorming sessions and team collaboration exercises with distributed participants. Recommendations address session design, participant engagement and the appropriate use of distance learning software. To illustrate the points made in the whitepaper it concludes with an example of the design, preparation and execution of recent interactive webinar.

About Julia Young

Julia Young is a co-founder of Facilitate.com. She has over 20 years of experience as a facilitator and process consultant, with her primary focus being the integration of collaboration technology into group processes. Combining the logical mind of an engineer and a facilitator's attention to group dynamics, Julia seeks to explore how distance learning technology can augment the effectiveness of work teams. Julia blogs at www.facilitate.com/blog/

About Facilitate.com

Facilitate.com is a meeting facilitation services firm and the developer of FacilitatePro: web meeting software designed to enhance structured meetings focused on idea generation, problem-solving, decision-making, strategic planning, collaborative learning and risk management. The San Francisco headquartered firm helps distributed organizations run productive business meetings and collaborate anytime, anywhere, using customizable and cost-efficient meeting/interactive webinar solutions. FacilitatePro software is ideal for organizations that want to increase the level of participation in their virtual online meetings and distance learning initiatives.