Interact and Engage!: 50+ Activities for Virtual Training, Meetings, and Webinars

by Kassy Laborie, Thomas Stone

Convince your online participants to tune in―and get them to interact and engage.

Virtual classroom training is here to stay, and web and video conferencing is close to ubiquitous. Interact and Engage! offersproven strategies for captivating your live online audience. With more than 50 activities ranging from openers and icebreakers to closers, instructional design experts Kassy LaBorie and Tom Stone present a framework for igniting online training programs, meetings, and webinars.

Engaging online audiences can be difficult. This is true for novice instructional designers and facilitators―and for experienced ones. Learn how to break the mold of static lecture-style online training that drives participants to multitask or, worse, tune out. LaBorie and Stone cover all the steps necessary to remedy poor online training experiences and ensure that what you teach sticks.

In this book you

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Business

232 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2015

Reviews

[Sharon Orlopp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific book to help ensure virtual learning is engaging and interactive.

[Carrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up a couple months ago, figuring it would come in handy one day soon. Lo and behold, that time has come! Unfortunately, many of these activities are a bit basic to the point they're unusable. (Though, this book was published in 2015 and I imagine these activities were a bit overdone by then already, no?) As an example, an exercise called Recognizing Diversity (p. 135) uses photos of dogs from a variety of breeds as a jumping off point for discussing the value of diversity. I've specialized in diversity and inclusion topics for the last several years, and this trite activity is at best, obvious, and at worst, demeaning.

But for this book, it's a case of seeing the forest for the trees. The activities in the book serve as a jumping off point for your own creativity. The book is entirely action-oriented, even in the contextual content included. Few books are as immediately implement-able as this text, and for that, it deserves kudos.

At the time that I purchased this book, I also got Virtual Training Tools and Templates: An Action Guide to Live Online Learning. The author of that book, Cindy Huggett, wrote the forward for this book and some of the content in this book is pulled from Huggett's text with permission. If you are new to the online learning world, start with Huggett's book - it will walk you through the technical side of things and give you a frame of reference for functionality. Then, when you're ready to design and mix things up, bust out Interact and Engage! to help you think outside the box.

[Loren Sanders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and actionable ideas! Read it today and put them to use tomorrow. Do it and you and your learners will have more fun with better results than you imagined!

[Jessica Pastor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actionable examples that help as a starting point for idea generation. Many of the topics suggested won’t work for my senior leaders/engineers but I can easily adapt topics that make sense and are of Interest to my audience. A good tool to help start the creative juices flowing when I was having idea block. Explains a lot of technical tips for how to use online tools however it references tools and shares screen images that clearly are dated. Important to familiarize yourself with the tool you will be using.

[Maggie Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some great ideas to get you started, a handful are a little outdated or really cheesy for adults, but it's a great book to give you some strong examples and help you generate more ideas yourself!

[Dimitri · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Highlights: https://learning.oreilly.com/u/748020...

[Christina · Rating 1 out of 5]

This should have been a pdf with tips and tricks, not a book to pay almost 40$ to get.
Design is poor, look & feel outdated and there was no background in teaching you a bit more about online learning. Very disappointed.