Online Meetings

This page offers an overview of the possibilities for online meetings and events. Once you have decided on an event, you may wish to visit the Online Meeting Planning Checklist page.

What is an Online Meeting? When should I use one?¶

An online meeting is where two or more people use internet or telephone based tools to do something together. Just like offline, what happens depends on the purpose of the meeting. Some examples are:

An informational meeting where information is presented or disseminated, typically with one or more people presenting and everyone else watching and listening. If not done well, these can be even more boring than when we do this face to face! (F2F) These can scale out to very large numbers and are useful when you have to quickly get information out With good design, you can build in interaction in the form of questions and answers, polls for feedback, etc.

A team meeting where a small group of people work through an agenda of business items which may include informational items, brainstorming, decision making or other team processes. These are generally meetings of 10 people or less if there is to be true interaction of all members.

A training or workshop where skills are presented and participants practice and learn together.

Peer learning, where participants engage in learning with and from each other. This might include talking about one's work or projects, doing a http://www.kstoolkit.org/Peer+AssistsPeer Assist to focus on the needs of one person, or an http://www.kstoolkit.org/After+Action+ReviewAfter Action Review of a project.

Online meetings are useful when you have a distributed group of participants and there is insufficient time and/or resources to travel to get together. Face to face is wonderful, but we can do a lot of good work online as well. It takes some time to get used to, but people have demonstrated both successful web meetings and cost savings.

What about longer form online events?¶

While we typically think about 60-90 minute online meetings (about the maximum attention span) people are creating entire online conferences that run over multiple days, have many synchronous sessions as well as asynchronous web based discussions and sharing of resources.

How do I plan and facilitate an online meeting?¶

Check out the Online Meeting Planning ChecklistOnline Meeting Checklist

What tools should I consider for an online meeting?¶

The most important consideration in choosing a tool is to know what sorts of activities you need to support in your meetings. Then you can look for tools that support those activities. For example, sometimes talking on the telephone or web based voice tools like Skype (http://www.skype.comhttp://www.skype.com) is all you need! Keep it simple if small group conversation is the main activity.

If you determine you need a full fledged web meeting tool, check out this page which gives an example list of web meeting tools (free and paid) http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/15/online-meeting-tools/

Resources:¶

A great discussion thread on facilitating online meetings from the discussion list of the International Association of Facilitators http://www.iaf-forum.org/showthread.php?t=1480
Learning in Real Time (Jonathan Finkelstein) an EXCELLENT Book!
A short introduction to synchronous web based meetings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvJHnEd99Ao
Best basic resource on synchronous web meetings http://synchfacilitation.wikispaces.com/
An example list of web meeting tools (free and paid) http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/15/online-meeting-tools/
Facilitate.com's introduction to good web meetings http://www.facilitate.com/support/facilitator-toolkit/docs/Designing-Interactive-Webinars.pdf and Six Ways to Make Pre-Work Compelling http://www.facilitate.com/support/facilitator-toolkit/docs/6-Ways-to-make-prework-compelling.pdf
Telephone conference call tips http://www.fullcirc.com/resources/facilitation-resources/teleconference-call-tips/
Skype meeting tips from John Smith http://technologyforcommunities.com/2010/03/skype-as-a-community-platform/
The Synchronous Trainer's Survival Guide (Jennifer Hoffman)
Interactivity in Virtual Classrooms (slides only)
Tips for Making Virtual Classrooms More Interactive (Sue Waters)
More assorted tips
Resources at the bottom of this page http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Facilitating_Online/course_mini_conference
Top Synchronous Training Myths and Their Realities – By Nanette Miner
InSynch Training and their Synchronous Training Blog
LearningTimes training