Engage365 Announces Educate365, A New Educational Webinar Series
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
Engage365 has announced it will offer a new educational webinar series for association and event professionals entitled Educate365. The product of a strategic partnership between Omnipress and Peach New Media, the series will provide live monthly events to the community and will use Peach New Media’s proprietary Learning Content Management System,
Freestone™, to make the content available on-demand, year round.
I recently spoke to Omnipress Marketing Director and Engage365 Leader, Chris Uschan, to get a few more details about Educate365.
JENISE: What is Educate365?
CHRIS: Educate365 is merely a dedicated program for bringing educational webinars to our viewership and community.
JENISE: Is that what they wanted?
CHRIS: Yes. We surveyed them last year and they asked for it. Listening to those who support you is kind of important these days.
JENISE: And how will be useful for those attend these webinars?
CHRIS: Like webinars we did in the past, we will focus on topics that are close to making a better event via social media, technology or new ways and approaches. Participants can learn from knowledgeable subject matter experts and they can learn from other webinar participants via the twitter back channel. The ideas behind this is to give ideas and insights that our participants can apply to their events. The other useful thing for our audience is our process.
JENISE: What do you mean?
CHRIS: Well, It’s more than a webinar. We’ll have pre-event presenter interviews, post-event written webinar summaries, useful handouts/takeaways, and #engage365 chats around each topic/webinar. One webinar creates many opportunities for content and we’re going to take advantage of that to engage our audience before, during and after the webinar.
JENISE: That makes a lot of sense.
CHRIS: It’s not rocket science. It’s logical.
JENISE: What kind of topics will there be?
CHRIS: Social learning, meeting formats, technology (which is a broad topic), hybrid meetings, engaging strategies and more. We asked the community last year what they wanted to learn more about so we’re doing our best to hit those topics.
JENISE: That sounds like crowdsourcing?
CHRIS: (laughs) I love that term.
JENISE: Why the chuckle?
CHRIS: It’s a modern term to something that isn’t new.
JENISE: But you’re doing it?
CHRIS: Yes, it’s important to have input from the community. If organizations don’t know what their members want, it’s a problem.
JENISE: How are presenters chosen?
CHRIS: Based on topics, we will seek out presenters who we feel have strong experience and knowledge around that topic.
JENISE: Is there any continuing education credits involved with this?
CHRIS: Not out of the gate, but that’s something we’re kicking around. Hence, it’s one of the reasons we decided to partner with Peach.
JENISE: Tell me about the partnership with them?
CHRIS: Johnson Cook and Dave Will (founders) at Peach New Media are good people and I’ve known them for years. So we had a bit of a relationship going into it. They also have a solid webinar, registration, online learning system and offered to integrate it with our Engage365 web site. As well, they are well connected with associations and thought leaders. More importantly, like Omnipress, they are passionate about giving back to the association and meetings industry. We felt between our organizations we could maximize our reach to some really good presenters and the industry. And, like anything, when you collaborate with fun, smart people, ideas start flowing.
JENISE: Are you partnering with anyone else?
CHRIS: Not at this time, but we’re open to working together with other organizations (like we did with Events For Good / CharityHappenings). However, we can only do so much at one time.
JENISE: Do you have to be an Engage365 member to watch these webinars?
CHRIS: Not at all, but if you subscribe to Engage365 via RSS or join the community, you’ll get regular updates on what’s going on.
JENISE: How can people learn more?
CHRIS: Click Webinars and Educate365. There’s not too much to it. Or just check out the Events section (on the home page).
JENISE: Thanks for your time Chris.
CHRIS: Always a pleasure to chat. And, keep up the great work you are doing here.
The Educate365 series will kick off with featured experts, Jeff Cobb, Founder and CEO of Tagoras, and Mitchell Beer, of The Conference Publishers.
Photo by cogdogblog
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One Responses to this article
This looks great. I’ll look forward to taking part in some of the webinars, thanks!