How do I use an LMS classroom course to host a webinar?

Learning Path Development>Creating & Uploading Courses

Webinars are nothing new but their usage has increased year over year as a cost effective and engaging way to bring a geographically dispersed population together. Realizing the potential, several major players such as WebEx and Adobe have reduced the costs and equipment needed to run a high-quality webinar that can handle thousands of simultaneous users. However, companies that may want to issue PACE, CLE or MCLE credits, and a customizable certificate run into scale problems.

It just so happens, Knowledge Anywhere's LMS can handle this situation beautifully. Instructor Led Training (ILT) courses adapt very easily to handle not just physical classroom locations, but virtual ones too.

If your organization leverages Webex, Adobe Connect or other webinar services, read below to see how the LMS can help you reduce costs.

Scenario:

You are holding a webinar with hundreds of users who will need a certificate of completion with their name on it. You need a place for users to log in, provide their details for certificate purposes and launch the webinar. (You may want to let them know that the email address they use to register for the webinar needs to match the email address they use to register in the LMS). At the end of your webinar, you will receive a list of users who attended the webinar either by exporting the list from the webinar platform or a list of users who completed a post-webinar survey.

You would also like some idea of how many users will be registering as a way to track interest.

How do We Accomplish This?

Step 1: Create Your ILT Course

Let’s start by logging into the LMS and creating a new course, set the course type to ‘ILT.'

Fill in the relevant details:

• If you need to know who plans to attend, ensure the ‘Registration required’ field is checked.
• Copy and paste the webinar URL from the webinar platform into the ‘Location’ field. You may want to style it as a hyperlink. An example is provided below. Replace the Xs with your webinar URL, then copy and paste into the Location field.

<a href="xxx" target="_blank">Click Here to Launch the Webinar</a>

• Make sure your class description contains all the information the webinar attendees will need to launch and attend the webinar. Include information about any login information, login codes, registration information, browser compatibility, etc.

Complete the course creation process and assign it to a course set and group. You can now point your users to this ILT course and ask them to register. You can view the attendance by either running the ILT attendance report, or clicking the ‘Roster’ button for course on the ‘Manage Courses’ page.

Step 2: Use the Excel Import Feature to Mark Users Complete in Bulk

After the webinar, you can use the Spreadsheet Import feature to mark attendees complete, enabling them to receive their certificate. Generally, WebEx or whoever you used for the webinar will supply you with a list of email addresses of those who attended. To prepare that list for import, ensure that list is the one and only column in an Excel spreadsheet.

To import the list of email addresses, click on the Roster button for the ILT for the webinar. This takes you to a list of learners who registered if you required registration. Either way, there's a button near the top called “Import Via Excel.” Select the Excel file with the email addresses in it, select Mark Users As “Completed” and click Submit. Once the import is complete, you'll see the results below the Submit button. For example,
Users imported successfully: 432
Users failed to import: 27

Any email addresses that match existing learners in your system will be imported, added to the Roster of the webinar even if they didn't previously register, and marked Complete.

If an email address is found that doesn't match a learner in your system, it will fail to import and you will be shown a list of those addresses in case you want to contact them.

STEP 3: Instruct users to log into the LMS and print their certificate

After you have bulk imported your users and marked them complete in Step 2, you may instruct users to log in to the Learning Management System and download their certificate by navigating to the 'Completed Courses' section of their transcript.