Certification of Attendance is a feature that not many webinar/webcast products have added yet. That is a bit surprising, given how common it is for online training software. The idea is to provide validated proof of attendance in a web meeting.
I had one client who used to host very large webcasts with thousands of attendees. They would provide proof of attendance that participants could submit to their state professional society for educational credit. But to satisfy the certification requirements, presenters would be forced to display four interactive polls during the online session. Then the administrator would check poll response records afterwards and manually verify that each attendee had submitted responses to at least three of the four polls to prove that the person was not just logged in, but was actively paying attention and interacting. It was a lot of work, and it also resulted in some really stupid polls that weren't actively providing value, but were just there as an administrative requirement. The list of verified emails would get passed to a second system to send out a proof of attendance email.
Webinato is one web conferencing product that has attempted to automate this process for clients that need it. An optional (extra cost) "Certification Module" works in conjunction with their "Presence Manager" feature.
The Presence Manager displays a simple message to attendees in a pop up box. It requires them to click a quick response. The administrator can configure the message text, the randomized frequency for time between displays, and how long the box remains on the screen.
The response scores for each participant are available in reports, but more interestingly, they can be used as part of the criteria for automatically sending your own customized certificate PDF. Certification can be based on things such as total time in session and presence response scores.
Once you have defined your certificate image and criteria, you can select the appropriate certificate for your session and the system will email it to all attendees who pass the criteria. You get a report on who was validated and whether they have downloaded their certificate.
Not everybody needs this functionality, but it's a fantastic convenience for those who provide certification. It's something that more vendors should be considering as a value-add for their web conferencing customers.
