The Webinar Blog

Webinar Case Study - A Year of Pathology Training (Part 2 of 3)

• 1 Year
• 75 Webinars
• 39,894 Live logins
• 130,871 Recording views

PART 2: OPERATIONAL AND TECHNICAL ISSUES

We started off using the CAP’s existing GoToWebinar account. It was already in place and made rapid setup possible. By the second lecture, we had a problem… We had maxed out the default 1000 person attendance capacity for interactive webinars under that plan. People had been blocked from attending. That wouldn’t normally be a big problem. GoToWebinar allows you to set up webinars in “webcast mode,” allowing up to 3000 attendees. There were minor tradeoffs (a buffered audio/video stream meant less use of instant back-and-forth interactions with attendees, and people lost the ability to call in and listen by phone as an audio option). We could live with those issues.

But it turns out that you can’t change the mode of an already scheduled series. Remember that we wanted a single registration to let people attend any lecture on any day. We had around 3000 people registered already. And there was no way to keep them in the system. I had to schedule a new series under a new title. Then we had to reach out to everyone and ask them to register again under the new link and to receive a new login link for the remaining daily lectures. As you might imagine, there were a few days of confusion as people attempted to login under the old link.

INSIGHT – PLAN FOR SUCCESS. IF YOU THINK YOU MIGHT GET ANYWHERE CLOSE TO A CAPACITY LIMIT, STRUCTURE YOUR SETUP ACCORDINGLY. AND VENDORS – YOUR CUSTOMERS WILL ALWAYS WANT TO CHANGE OPTIONS IN MIDSTREAM. WORK ON DEVELOPING WAYS TO MAKE THAT POSSIBLE.

These daily webinars were happening so fast that in most cases there was no lead time for a prep and familiarization session with the guest lecturer. Instead, we would just log in 30 minutes in advance of the go-live time and go over the essentials in private mode. On one of the early webinars, the guest lecturer accidentally clicked the button to take us live to the audience before the start time. I rolled with it and did a little interactive chatter with the early attendees. This quickly turned into a popular part of the daily routine. It even spawned a segment known as “Coffee With Ken” with its own Twitter hashtag! Sometimes I used an interactive poll to stimulate the conversation and sometimes I just used the Q&A facility to read what the early attendees wrote in. Sometimes I shared a picture of something in my life. I picked a new leading question or topic each day (online “conversation starters” websites were a great resource). The only criteria was to keep it light and fun and not connected with pathology.

One of the program stakeholders told me that this pre-show lighthearted segment was rated as a valuable part of the lecture series. “At a time when everyone was scared, and seeing medical crises on a daily basis, and didn’t know what would happen next, it was 15 minutes of hanging out with friends and building a sense of social engagement and community.”

INSIGHT – COMMUNITY BUILDING CAN BE A STRONG BENEFIT OF WEBINARS. LOOK FOR WAYS TO “BE HUMAN” AND SHARE THE JOY OF BEING TOGETHER TO SUPPLEMENT THE VALUE OF YOUR FORMAL SUBJECT MATTER.

Most of the visuals in our lectures consisted of microscopic images of cells taken from pathology slide studies. The lecturer needed to rapidly point at a small feature of a cell wall or nucleus and then shift attention to something else in the image. This led me to a shocking discovery that I highlighted in a blog post last year… Your Windows cursor is a lie.

Even though you can change the size, color, and shape of your mouse cursor on your screen, only you can see the altered cursor. The default small white arrow is passed to screen sharing and screen capture programs. This meant that lecturers with high resolution monitors always showed a tiny cursor that could be very hard for attendees to see. The only way to get around this was to use the built-in highlighting tools in GoToWebinar, but we found that the presenter had to turn off the highlighter to advance the slide, then turn it on again. Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you try running a lecture with 200 slides being shown in rapid succession, trying to quickly highlight one small thing on each slide.

INSIGHT – IF A PARTICULAR TYPE OF VISUAL INTERACTION IS CRITICAL IN YOUR WEBINAR, TEST THE HECK OUT OF IT AHEAD OF TIME. TEST HOW THE AUDIENCE SEES THE CURSOR, THE ANIMATION, THE HIGHLIGHT, THE ANNOTATION. AND KNOW HOW IT AFFECTS YOUR FLOW OF OPERATIONS.

Late in the program, the CAP tested a platform switch, moving from GoToWebinar to GoToWebcast, which they relied on for certain other educational offerings. Even though the technology names are similar and are offered by the same vendor, they are quite different in behavior. We discovered that our account was not provisioned to allow screen sharing, which meant that lecturers needed to provide me with their locked-down PowerPoint presentation a day in advance so I could upload it for display. It reduced flexibility and agility, and meant that lecturers could not show live digital microscope images if desired. We ended up going back to GoToWebinar as the technology platform that worked best for this particular series.

INSIGHT – EVERY WEBINAR PLATFORM HAS STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES. SOMETIMES YOU CAN’T TELL WHAT WORKS BEST FOR YOUR NEEDS UNTIL YOU TRY IT.

In PART 3, I’ll examine how the CAP integrated social media to expand its effectiveness.

 

Technorati Tags: CAP,College of American Pathologists,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration,online seminar,online collaboration

Webinar Case Study - A Year of Pathology Training (Part 1 of 3)

• 1 Year
• 75 Webinars
• 39,894 Live logins
• 130,871 Recording views

PART I: BACKGROUND AND PROJECT INITIATION

Over the last year, I have had the privilege of assisting the College of American Pathologists with a tremendously successful webinar series. They were kind enough to let me write about it here with some observations and insights from my viewpoint as technical administrator and moderator.

Last March, as COVID-19 isolation and work-from-home policies rapidly went into effect around the world, pathology trainees who would normally receive supervised training, case work, and practical experience in hospitals, clinics, or practices suddenly found themselves at home with fewer opportunities to enhance their knowledge. The College of American Pathologists (CAP) recognized that as the largest member society for pathologists, they were in a unique position to provide education for members of the profession in the earlier part of their careers.

The CAP thought they might be able to offer a few training lectures designed specifically for pathology residents, presented by experienced faculty. They decided to call the offering a Virtual Lecture Series. The initial thought was that they would offer a lecture each workday in April, focusing on different specialty areas of pathology study and practice. Pathology residents would register once and be able to attend any of the lecture subjects that caught their eye.

I got an email on Thursday, March 26th, asking if I had time for a brief phone call to talk about the practicality of this tentative idea, which hadn’t yet been approved by management. The following Wednesday (April 1) we held our first lecture – four working days later! 1818 people had registered and 879 actually attended.

INSIGHT – YOU CAN GO FROM CONCEPT TO PRODUCTION IN A REMARKABLY SHORT TIME IF YOU HAVE AN IDENTIFIED AUDIENCE WITH A SHARED NEED AND AN EXISTING COMMUNICATION NETWORK. NOT EVERY WEBINAR NEEDS A TWO-MONTH MARKETING CAMPAIGN.

In a heartening show of solidarity and service to their profession, dozens of experienced and noted pathology specialists readily agreed to present lectures online without asking for payment or reimbursement for their time. Most had presentations already available in their files from past lectures or materials they had planned to present at conferences that were suddenly cancelled, so they were able to quickly suggest topics and brush up their content to join the roster with very little lead time.

INSIGHT – DON’T OVERLOOK THE BENEFIT OF BRINGING EXISTING PRESENTATIONS TO A WIDER AUDIENCE. NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE NEW AND UNSEEN.

The CAP thought that they were likely to get some interest from pathology residents in the USA who wanted a way to fill the gaps on normal training opportunities they were missing during lockdown. Maybe word of mouth would slowly spread and attendance might grow over time.

Instead, they were surprised to find instant, strong demand from listeners around the world. People attended the lectures at the most inconvenient local times from dozens of countries on almost every continent. We also saw attendance from pathologists working in practice, well out of their residencies. Doctors loved the ability to get refreshers on specialty topics from some of the top practitioners in their field and to join in the larger spirit of community learning.

INSIGHT – THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A LOCAL WEBINAR. CONSIDER HOW YOU WILL ACCOMMODATE GLOBAL INTEREST AND AUDIENCES INCLUDING PEOPLE YOU HADN’T EXPECTED.

In PART 2, I’ll examine operational and technical issues we encountered.

 

Technorati Tags: CAP,College of American Pathologists,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration,online seminar,online collaboration

Webex Still Doesn’t Understand Video

It’s been more than an hour since my last rant about Webex product design, so we are overdue.

Today I moderated a client webinar that featured no screen sharing or document upload… It was just a simple panel discussion with several people exploring a topic. The only thing for attendees to focus on were the members of the panel.

In addition to the featured panelists, I was in the conference taking care of technical matters and we had three business stakeholders who wanted to be available to prioritize audience questions, communicate with the panelists behind the scenes, and supply links or resources in the chat if called for.

I recorded the session to the Webex account in the cloud and when I went back to take a look at the recording, here is what I saw (I blurred the display names in this post for confidentiality purposes).

The grid view is perfect… That’s how I had the layout setting on my host computer. But I also had suppressed display of non-video participants for myself. Those are the grey squares you see here with initials and names of the behind-the-scenes stakeholders.

No problem… I know that Webex offers the ability to display or suppress various components of a recorded session by using the recording options editor. I went to that menu and looked for the option to hide non-video participants:

No luck. While I can hide Chat, Q&A, Polls, and the Participant List, I can’t get rid of those empty gray squares. They take up space, distract, look ugly, and call attention to the names of people who should be hidden to the attendees.

Fortunately I was logged in on a second computer as an attendee and used Camtasia to capture the attendee view as a backup recording:

Now there are a few interesting things to note here as well:

1) I’m missing two of the active presenters. Why do I see six camera feeds in the cloud recording, but only four on the local attendee computer? Does Webex only show a square grid, so you see four or nine people, but nothing in between? I’m honestly not sure, and would welcome your comment. It seems like a strange limitation, and doesn’t match the following picture I lifted off the internet with what looks like a Webex instructional image showing a grid view with five video feeds:

2) In the Webex stock photo, do you see the “Layout” button at top right which offers the displayed menu for options? Where is it on my attendee view? It turns out that the button is invisible until you click your mouse in the content display area. It’s awfully tricky to instruct attendees on what they should click in order to adjust their display preferences when the thing they are supposed to click is invisible! I might give some instruction early on, but anybody who joins late has no idea the option even exists.

3) As a host, I have no control over the default way that my content should be displayed to my audience. I can’t force it to grid view for everyone, I can’t choose to show or hide panelist names, and I can’t hide non-video participants. That last one is the most egregious… What design manager decided that the default in a meeting should be to show empty placeholders for people who are not using their camera? Maybe there are cases when that’s desirable, but should it be the default mode? If you want attendees to see the names of everyone in the meeting, show them the Participant List… It’s already an existing feature. I found a thread on the Webex community forum site with more than 260 votes from customers asking to change this behavior.

Look, I’m familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any closed system, entropy tends to increase, leading to a maximal state of disorder. I just wish the Webex software engineers would stop trying so hard to force the issue.

Technorati Tags: Webex,Webex Events,Webex Meetings,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online collaboration,web collaboration,web conference,web conferencing,video conferencing

What Do Your Webinar Attendees See Before You Start?

Oh dear… This is going to be one of those long and detailed posts for people who really like thinking about webinar details. Get a cup of coffee and prepare for a deep dive!

BACKGROUND

The subject is what webinar attendees see if they log in before your formal presentation has started. It’s different in every webinar product, and sometimes is different within those products depending on how you use them. In most cases I would argue that the cosmetics and psychology are not well thought out by the webinar vendors.

I’ll pick a few of the most common and well-known webinar platforms as tangible examples, but you’ll find similar things to look out for in whatever technology you happen to use.

We’ll assume that you are familiar with the underlying goal… You want the presenters, moderator, Q&A assistants, and whoever else has a finger in the pie to be able to login early and test their connections, go over last-minute details, and prepare to start on time. Meanwhile, you have encouraged attendees to log in a little early to make sure they are able to connect and start on time. Ideally you don’t want your early bird attendees to see and hear the chitchat going on behind the scenes. The attendees should feel as though they are welcomed, acknowledged, and are encouraged to be a part of the proceedings. In a classic physical auditorium event they would probably hear music piped over the room speakers while seeing some nice graphics on the projection screens at the front of the stage.

Common terminology that goes along with this includes: “Green Room” – this is the private space where presenters can hang out and chat without audience members seeing or hearing them. “Lobby” – this is a holding area where audience members can wait before the show starts.

ZOOM

Let’s start with Zoom. As with most everything else in that product, simplicity is the overriding priority. You don’t have much choice in configuration… It is what it is. The tricky part is that you have to remember to tick a checkbox when you schedule your webinar in order to get the option for private setup time:

I think “Practice Session” is a misleading phrase for this functionality, but there you have it. Now presenters can enter the webinar and communicate in private before the host officially starts the public broadcast. During that time, audience members who attempt to connect see a window like this:

I like the fact that it confirms the start time and the webinar title. I like that it gives attendees an obvious and easy way to check their audio. I don’t like the fact that they see a rotating circle icon, which gives the impression that the system is still processing something and hasn’t completed the information display. I don’t like the fact that it uses the qualitative phrase “will begin soon.” Is it really soon if people have logged in 30 minutes early? I’d be happier with options to edit the displayed text (especially on the fly to send announcements). And I’d love a way to be able to get on audio and say something to the waiting throngs. But those are more advanced features than I have a right to expect from Zoom.

GOTOWEBINAR

Our next example comes from GoToWebinar. That product gives you two ways to handle green room time. Your first option is to run the event in “Practice Mode.” Almost identical to the Zoom operation discussed above, this keeps early attendees in a holding status, looking at a similar predefined window:

Pros and cons are similar to those mentioned with Zoom, but once again there are unfortunate choices of phrasing baked into the window. “The meeting will begin when the organizer arrives” makes it sound like the host simply forgot to show up for their own event, not that things are going on in the background. I also don’t like referring to webinars as meetings. And at the bottom, it offers a question and option that are not appropriate for registered attendees. I’d rather they see something that doesn’t make it look like we have no idea who organized this thing or where they are. I get the distinct impression of a “Does anyone know how to fly this plane?” scenario.

But there is another choice in GoToWebinar. You can start the webinar and choose to hold off on starting the broadcast. In this mode, attendees actually complete the login process and see anything that is currently being shared by the active presenter. They can type questions, they can see typed chat announcements from the host, they can benefit from “lobby slides” that give instructions or questions or information before the official start time. It’s a great way to add early engagement and really make people feel like they are sitting in the auditorium waiting for the show to start.

What are the drawbacks?

1) Presenters can’t really “flip through” their slides. The audience sees whatever the team sees.

2) There is no way to give an audio announcement while staying in private mode.

3) In GTW, panelists need to be raised to organizer authority in order to see typed audience questions. That presents them with a big prominent button at the top of their control panel prompting them to “Start Broadcast.” They’ll push it, trust me. If they are on telephone audio, they’ll get a similar confusing voice prompt to press 1 to start audio, which sounds like something they have to do for their own audio. It’s terrible design.

4) If panelists use webcams, early attendees see placeholders for the camera feeds with no content. It lists each person’s name and the word “Paused”:

I might not want to show the names of everyone on the team. I don’t want attendees wondering why the visible content area is small and they can’t see something. It’s just not necessary… If no cameras are broadcasting to the audience, don’t show the camera area.

WEBEX

For our third example, let’s take a look at Webex Events. Webex offers a Practice Mode that isolates the presentation team from attendees. So attendees complete their login process to the conference room and they can type questions. But Webex offers a couple of lovely extra features…

1) You can load a PowerPoint slide deck into the conference room and set it to automatically scroll through the slides on a timing delay of your choice:

Now you can enter Practice Mode and flip through your content slides with the team while attendees continue to see the auto-advancing slides in the main room. Great for displaying instructions, greetings, branding, etc.

2) You can exit and enter Practice Mode as many times as you like. So as host, I can tell the rest of the panelists to shut up while I take us public to deliver a standby announcement, then bring us back to Practice Mode immediately afterward. Very handy if you are facing a crisis and have to delay the start of your presentation.

But of course all is not perfection. Webex has that same old fixation on presenter video, showing placeholders for webcam feeds even when no panelist has webcams turned on… In fact, even when the event has been explicitly set up to prohibit use of webcam video!

And did you happen to notice the wide oval near the top of the slide display that says “Viewing Lobby”? Lobby.pptx is the name of the PowerPoint file I loaded into the room. Webex shows the file name to the attendees. Why? Why on Earth would I want them to see the arbitrary designation I gave the file in my directory? Ugh.

BEST PRACTICES

As I mentioned, other webinar platforms have their own capabilities and quirks. It behooves you as a webinar host, administrator, or presenter to understand how things work in the technology you are using. If practical, try to log in on a separate computer as an attendee so you can see their view.

As a general best practice, attempt to get out of private “green room” mode as early as possible so you can start interacting with your audience and making the experience conversational. Getting them in the mood to be active participants will pay off in greater engagement and satisfaction during the formal presentation.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web event,web collaboration,online event,online collaboration,Webex Events,Zoom Webinars,GoToWebinar

Webinar Webcam Weirdness: Video Showing While Disabled

Dear readers, I need your help. I have an exceptionally rare webcam bug that vendors can’t reproduce. I need to collect evidence – even anecdotal – that it’s real.

The symptom is that even though webcam video is turned off in the meeting, one or two people still see the streaming video of presenters while the rest of the participants see nothing.

This is clearly impossible. Yet it has now happened to me on two different webinar platforms in completely different scenarios.

Mind you, that is twice out of many hundreds of webinars and many thousands of participants. And it has affected maybe four or five people in total. That’s a vanishingly low occurrence rate. Of course the vendors can’t reproduce it when I report it. So they can’t diagnose it and can’t fix it. Indeed, they are quick to assume it is user error. But it isn’t.

The first time I had the situation occur was in a Webex Meeting. We had lots of participants. We had disabled the meeting option to “allow participants to turn on video.” I was logged in on one computer as host and on another computer as a standard meeting participant. On both computers, the webcam video display area showed no streaming video for any participants. But a participant wrote to tell me that he saw camera feeds for himself and a few other participants who did not seem to realize they were broadcasting. He sent me a screenshot to prove it. I had a screenshot from my computer showing those same people without video feeds. Webex tech support filed it as an open incident and said they couldn’t do anything about it unless it happened again.

Today I was on a GoToWebinar webinar. I opened the conference for panelists and we chatted with each other with webcams enabled. I had not started the active broadcast, so early attendees could not see us or hear us. I confirmed this on a second computer logged in as an attendee, which properly showed all webcam feeds blacked out. When I started the active broadcast mode, two attendees informed me they had been able to see our cameras for the entire 30-minute prep period, although they could not hear us. When I asked the audience about this, everyone else said they had not been able to see our video during the prep.

Once again, GoToWebinar is unable to reproduce the problem. Although a tech rep said he was able to find one other similar report from half a year ago, which they wrote off as probable user error.

I am careful to log in as an attendee so I can verify what my audience is seeing whenever I host a webinar. But if everything looks good on my computer, how do I know some attendees are seeing something else? They may not even know it’s unintended and that it represents a problem. I am ignorant that anything is amiss until and unless a participant writes to me.

Having people show up on camera when they think they are safely hidden is a recipe for disaster. If the host can’t see it is happening, it’s even worse. If you have ever been involved with a similar occurrence on any webinar software, could you please write a comment or send me an email? The first step in solving these issues is proving they exist.

Thank you!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,online collaboration,web collaboration,webcast,webcasting,web meeting,GoToWebinar,Webex,streaming video,video conferencing

Zoom Needs To Improve Group Registration

Hey, Zoom… Thanks for wasting my morning. I have a few meetings set up for a client. They have a list of people they want to invite. They don’t want these people to have to self-register and they don’t want to send out a generic meeting attendance link that could get forwarded and shared. Each person should have their own login link that will allow us to track participation.

So far, so good. Zoom is set up for that. I simply check the box in the meeting setup to require registration. And now I can load in the names and emails of the participants who should get their login information…

Aha! The shoe drops. If this were a Zoom webinar, there would be no problem – I can import a CSV file with all the names and emails of my participants. But for a meeting, I can’t do that. I have to bring up the interactive registration page and type or paste in the first name, last name, email address, and email address again for confirmation. Then click the register button. Then go through I’m Not A Robot validation, which can currently take up to twenty selection clicks, multiple attempts, and delays while waiting for replacement images to get displayed. Over and over and over, for each and every person in each and every meeting session. It’s maddening.

It’s also so easy to avoid. Zoom could allow bulk upload of a CSV file for meetings… We know the code and the design is already in place. Or they could allow a bulk input screen for account administrators to use while logged into their account, with slots for multiple records of first/last/email and no robot verification required. Or they could build a group registration page that offers the ability for a group coordinator to enter multiple participants with a single human validation check.

I’m perfectly willing to accept that most meeting participants self-register, one at a time. But that’s no reason to make it the ONLY way to get people registered.

Technorati Tags: Zoom,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online meeting,web event,web collaboration,online collaboration

Why You Can’t Trust A Webex Recording

Did you know that your Webex recording might not capture what you saw and heard during your session? Let’s examine why.

My discovery stems from personal experience. I think you’ll find it instructive.

We start with the basics. I moderated a client webinar set up on Webex Events (that is the webinar version of their collaboration software, distinct from their peer-level meeting version). All went well during the webinar, without any notable tech issues. Several presenters participated from various locations around the world. Participants joined from many more countries. I had no complaints or reports of audio/video problems.

We recorded the webinar using the built-in Webex recorder and saved it to our Webex account on the cloud, as usual. When I reviewed the recording, everyone sounded great except for one presenter. Every time this person spoke, the audio was garbled to the point of being unintelligible. It’s important to remember that he sounded just fine in the live session. And that everyone else on the recording sounded fine. What the heck could cause the recording to repeatedly fail to capture what we all heard in the live session, and only have the symptom appear for one presenter?

I filed a support ticket with Webex and went through the usual obligatory rounds of confirming details, having it kicked up to higher levels of support investigation, and collecting log information from the affected presenter’s computer. I was assured that the Cisco engineering team was working on the case and that they would update me on the status.

To Cisco’s credit, they did keep me in the loop to ensure that the case was still open. Every few days I would receive a new email from my support contact informing me that they were still investigating. This went on for one month.

At the end of the month, I received the following reply:

Received an update from the Engineering team and they found that the garbled audio for one of the presenter happened because of the packet loss from speaker to server.

We appreciate your patience on this matter and understand the importance of this recording.

Engineering team has worked to the best of their efforts and apologizes for the inconvenience caused.

Kindly let me know if there is anything else we can help you with and feel free to email me.

I wrote back that I was confused. First of all, I could not tell whether this was a brush-off and that “Engineering team has worked to the best of their efforts” meant that they had determined there was nothing they could do and that the ticket was being closed without a fix. If that’s the resolution on a case, I think it needs to be much more explicit. (My interpretation was correct. That was indeed what they were telling me.)

My bigger confusion came from the statement that the underlying cause was packet loss from speaker to server. If the originating signal coming from the presenter’s computer up to the internet was bad, why wouldn’t we have heard that in the live session? His signal goes up to the server in the first place, where it gets redistributed back down to each participant’s computer. Shouldn’t we have heard the same garbled sound the recording captured?

When I posed this question to my support contact, I received the following breathtaking reply:

Server received audio data, if there is uplink loss, will do FEC mechanism to recover the lost packets, but it only apply to attendee, not for recording. If use latest recording solution video centric, it have FEC for recording as well.

My goodness, there is a lot to unpack there. I am no network engineer. FEC was a meaningless acronym for me. I looked it up and found that Forward Error Correction is a methodology used to compensate for the fact that the internet sometimes loses packets of data that get sent from one point to another. FEC appears to be particularly useful for WebRTC streams of audio/video media.

I can build a mental image of Webex “pulling” the data stream up from the presenter’s computer, then “pushing” it out to all the listening attendees on the webinar. It would appear that the FEC compensation for missing data occurs during the “push” side of the operation, so listeners don’t hear the dropouts that occurred during the “pull” operation. But the recorder doesn’t benefit from that extra FEC correction step, so it captures the uncorrected, lossy data stream.

Which takes us to that final sentence where I was told that if only I had used “latest recording solution video centric” all would have been well. I had to do a little more Googling to get to the bottom of this one. It turns out that earlier this year, Cisco added an option to their network recording options. If you use a supported browser, and you have the latest version of Webex, and you record to the cloud in MP4 format, and your meeting ONLY includes webcam video without any document shares or whiteboard, then you can record in Video Centric mode, which applies the error correction. By the way, if you share a video clip, it will work for certain video formats - but only for Webex Meetings and not Webex Events. Neat.

So there you have it. The Webex recording you save online may or may not have the same quality that you saw in the live session. It may be unlistenable. Good luck with that.

Technorati Tags: Cisco Webex,Webex Meetings,Webex Events,FEC,packet loss,Webex recording,web conference,web conferencing,web collaboration,online collaboration,web meeting,online meeting,webinar,web seminar

Does Your Webinar Vendor Think Iran And Iraq Exist?

Here’s a fun experiment for you. Go to the registration page I created for a fake GoToWebinar event:

https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8478202629368445711

Click the Country dropdown selector (provided as a standard field in the product). Do you live in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq? What a pity… There’s no way to let your webinar host know that. Those countries don’t appear in the dropdown list.

Sounds like quite the embarrassing oversight, doesn’t it? Nope… That’s a design decision. Users have been complaining about it on the GoToWebinar Community Forum for years.

The official response from LogMeIn is as follows:

Our lists are designed to align with applicable laws that LogMeIn is subject to, including export law. For that reason, some countries that are not currently included will not be added. Others that are not subject to export law may be added in the future.

Many people have pointed out how ridiculous this statement is when applied to simply providing a text entry in a factual list of where a webinar registrant is located. It has nothing to do with technology export.

LogMeIn has dug in their heels. The most recent response (July of 2019) was:

If you are in the USA, you can discuss this with your US Senator. If not in the US, then have your government petition the US government.

Hey, LogMeIn… Guess what industry giant Cisco allows in their registration lists for Country? That’s right – Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq.

I tested ON24 and Zoom as well. They allow Afghanistan and Iraq, but omit Iran from the list.

As far as I can tell, Adobe Connect doesn’t even give you a preloaded dropdown selector. Their predefined Country field is just a type-in box (which makes it a practical impossibility to sort, sum, and analyze large registration lists by country).

Look, I get that tech companies are risk-averse when it comes to navigating the convoluted restrictions of international trade law. But this is an artificial bit of compliance window dressing that serves no purpose.

If you can’t sell product licenses to people in those countries, fine. Don’t sell licenses to people in those countries. But as far as I know, attendees are still allowed to join webinars from those locations. Simply eliminating the ability for hosts to see where those users are located does not stop international trade. It merely makes the hosts and the webinar participants angry.

I stand ready to write a heartfelt apology if someone can point me to a piece of legislation that prohibits listing those countries in a demographic selection list. Until I see it though, I’m more interested in lobbying my webinar platform vendor than my US Senator.

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration,online collaboration,web event,online event

Webinars In A Time Of COVID

Today’s request comes from long-time reader and all around nice person, Inga. Inga writes:

“Can you do a post on webinars/virtual events due to COVID and what you are seeing?”

Whew… how long do you have? I don’t want to write a novel, so I think I’d better jot down some brief observations in list format. I’ll number these for organization purposes, but the order is irrelevant. This is not a prioritized list.

 

1) Peer-level web meetings and web conferences are getting all the attention. The total number of webinars and webcasts being delivered worldwide has increased dramatically during the pandemic. But this number is dwarfed into insignificance by the growth in peer-level web collaboration. The media largely ignores structured presentation-oriented web events as opposed to peer-level meetings. Vendors such as Zoom, LogMeIn, and Cisco that make products for the two different use cases are prioritizing support, marketing, and development resources for the web meeting product. Vendors with a single product are doing backflips to prove that they can be applied equally well to both use cases. This is always a lie.

 

2) Vendor support has deteriorated. It’s a “Perfect Storm” scenario… More users, a higher percentage of new and inexperienced users, higher volume of web events, higher load demands on centralized cloud servers – all at the same time that support personnel are working from home and are not available as much because of childcare/health/computing setup issues. Company support hardware/software systems that route calls are designed for local in-office networks rather than remote home workers. The big third-party support farms in India and Asia are also affected in the same way.

Real-time interactive support channels (online chat and inbound telephone numbers) have been replaced by online forums and email addresses. I was talking to some colleagues recently and three of us shared that we had waited 4-5 months to receive a reply from Zoom to a submitted support request. In my case, I had a back-and-forth with a support person who did not understand how their own product worked and could not understand the operation question. After another month, his supervisor finally gave me an answer to the original question. I ran into a similarly clueless support rep from Webex who needed training on their own product features.

 

3) Convenience has trumped quality. This one is on the users, not the vendors. Presenters and attendees are using whatever is at hand rather than what will give the best performance. Built-in webcam and microphone on a laptop rather than higher quality accessories. Wireless networking rather than wired connections. Mobile phones for dial-in audio. This is completely understandable, but it interacts with the next point…

 

4) Network contention is a widespread problem. Home consumer wifi networks were not designed to handle the loads they are seeing. Dad is on a public webinar. Mom is on a company all-hands meeting. Little Timmy is taking a school class online. Teenage Debbie is streaming a movie on Netflix. Sure, it’s possible that they live in an area with high speed broadband or fiber connections and that they elected to pay for extra bandwidth, but you can’t count on that. Which is exacerbated by the next point…

 

5) Video is being overused. Web conferencing marketing teams have hyped video for several years: “You need video to engage your audience!” It’s a shiny, flashy product feature that is self-explanatory and easy to demonstrate or show in a product brochure. It catches people’s attention. Now every web meeting, seminar, or webcast seems to require everyone to be on camera all the time. It stresses presenters, who have to worry about how they look in addition to their sound and content. It stresses setup convenience in terms of lighting, backgrounds, camera adjustments, use of multiple monitors and sightlines. It stresses networks and cloud distribution networks with the additional bandwidth requirements. And increasingly we are discovering that it stresses viewers, leading to less comfort and satisfaction with online collaboration.

 

6) Vendors are struggling to deal with HTML5 differences in web browsers. HTML5 was going to be the great leveler… A secure, universal standard that developers could use to replace reliance on Flash in web browser audio/video communications. Except it turns out to be not so universal. Every web browser (and often different release levels of the same browser) have slightly different implementations of the HTML5 communications layer. So you see vendors placing a message somewhere in the middle of all their documentation, saying things like “We recommend the use of Chrome or Firefox.” Does that mean it won’t work at all in Safari? That there may be intermittent problems for some people? That performance may just be a bit slower in Microsoft Edge? We have no way to know as users. But I know I spend a lot of my time as a moderator/admin in client webinars responding to attendee complaints with a suggestion to just try another web browser and see if that fixes things. Not my favorite response strategy, but it’s the same response the vendor support teams give me!

 

7) Slide upload is getting supplanted by screen sharing. This one is actually not associated with the pandemic at all… It just happens to be coincidental in time, but it’s an important trend. Microsoft PowerPoint has become too powerful and is updated too frequently for webinar vendors to keep up with it and emulate its presentation capabilities inside their own products. Products like GoToWebinar and Zoom have never allowed a slide upload mode and presenters are still willing to use those products by the millions. So why should other webinar companies keep dumping resources into content upload capabilities? They will all eventually bow to the inescapable economic conclusion that it just tain’t worth it. That will be a sad day for me, as I prefer to use content upload when I can make it work.

 

8) Small frustrations now cause larger impacts. There are lots of little usage frustrations from webinar product to product that don’t count as bugs. They are just design decisions that make life a little less convenient or a little less efficient for webinar administrators, moderators, and presenters. Maybe generated reports require manual editing in order to analyze the data (date/time fields are not sortable because they are text strings, or minutes in session cannot be summed because they have “mins” attached to the numbers). Maybe copying and editing events requires additional steps or out-of-sequence visits to multiple pages and hidden options because the process hasn’t been thought out fully. As web event volumes and frequency go up, these little annoyances add up to create more work for the people who need to support them behind the scenes. The old cliché says that “time is the most valuable commodity,” but webinar vendors seem to place no value whatsoever on our time.

 

I promised I wouldn’t write a novel about this, so I think I’ll cut it off here and turn things over to my readers. I’d love to see your thoughts and insights in the online comment thread. If you are reading this offline, you can click here to visit the blog post on my site and let me know what else you see happening in our space. We all need to support each other during this time of isolation and remote collaboration!

(I do review and approve comments to keep out spam, and this is a particularly busy week. So you might not see your comment appear immediately, but I’ll publish it as soon as I can.)

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,web collaboration,online collaboration,web meeting,web event,online event

Why You Start A Webcast On Time

I find this attendance chart very instructive:

I pulled this from a new LinkedIn post by Jim Weldy, Enterprise Sales Director at MediaPlatform.

There wasn’t much detail associated with the graphic. Just a well-deserved bit of boasting about MediaPlatform’s ability to stage a very large online event with excellent Quality of Service and Quality of Experience for the customer. This one had around 35,000 concurrent viewers.

Sure, that’s more audience than most of us can ever dream of pulling in on a standard marketing or training webinar. It’s a different type of use case, and that’s why you might not have heard of MediaPlatform. It’s not in the same market segment as Webex and Zoom and GoToWebinar.

Still, we can use this huge event to illustrate a concept that is universal, but easier to see here than in smaller webinars.

Let’s assume you follow best practices and log in to your webinar/webcast platform well before the scheduled start time to make sure the presentation team is prepared and all equipment is performing adequately. As the start time draws near, at least one member of the team will say “Why don’t we wait a few minutes for latecomers to get in?” It sounds reasonable. You want to reach as many people as possible, don’t you?

And sure enough, if you look at the chart you see a sharp increase in the number of attendees during the first few minutes after they opened the room. But let’s dig deeper in our analysis (which is a little tricky because we don’t have the source data or the ability to zoom in on our view).

First, note the time code markers along the x-axis. They didn’t open the room right at 11am. They opened it at 10:58. So the sharp rise between the first two dots is from 10:58 to approximately 11:00 – no doubt representing people who connected early and were just impatiently waiting for something to happen.

At that point, representing the advertised starting time, they had 2660 people logged in and listening. A mere drop in the bucket when compared to all the people who would eventually join. But 2660 people! People who were so invested in the topic that they had made sure to be there right on time (probably ahead of time). Do you want to annoy 2660 of your most interested audience members by telling them that they are not important enough to talk to yet? That instead, you are going to wait a while longer to see if more people show up?

If so, how long do you wait? How many is enough for you? Look at the rest of the curve… Concurrent attendance goes up and up and up for 40 minutes!

Just start on time.

Fulfill the promise you made in your advertising and promotional materials. It clearly indicated when you were starting. If people join after that, they understand that they might have missed something. In fact, they BETTER have missed something! Otherwise they’ll just show up late for your future events, secure in the knowledge that you don’t start on time anyway.

It’s easier to see with large numbers, but it applies to any public, open-attendance web event. A portion of your audience respected you enough to believe that when you said you would start at 11am, you would actually do so. Don’t repay their trust with disrespect and dismissiveness. Work with the people who want to work with you. The rest can catch up later. They knew what they were doing.

Technorati Tags: MediaPlatform,Jim Weldy,webcast,webcasting,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,web event,online event,web collaboration,online collaboration