Some time ago DS13 taught the public Tableau and Alteryx at our Learn what the dataschool learns event. The following two weeks consisted of each DS13 member teaching their same sessions but in a 1 hour webinar. In this blog post I’ll share my experience of being a panellist on a colleague’s webinar and my experience of hosting my webinar.
Webinar Panelist:
I was the panellist for Joe’s webinar on using API’s in Alteryx. It was great to get this experience before my own webinar because I could see what I needed to do in terms of setting up the webinar and other logistical business.
The role of the panellist includes answering questions and responding to comments from the attendees. Since I could see what the attendees could see on my screen, I could also confirm to Joe if the webinar video was lagging or if we weren’t seeing what he was trying to share from his computer.
I don’t feel like I received too many questions from the attendees in the chat, which is a good sign because that means Joe was doing a great job! There were a couple I didn’t know how to answer but I was able to quickly message another colleague to get an answer in a reasonable time.
Webinar Host:
The first thing I want to mention is that if you book a meeting room to hold your webinar, book it for 15 minutes before you’re due to start so you have time to set things up in the room before you go live. There were people in the meeting room that I asked to leave, but I was conscious that I had not booked for the extra early time so I only asked them to leave 5 minutes before I was going live so it really stressed me out.
The webinar itself went well apart from one instance where I was showing how to create something but forgot a calculation. I had shared my entire desktop rather than just the tableau workbook I was using for the example. This meant I wasn’t able to look at my solutions workbook to remind myself without the attendees seeing.
I made sure to make my mouse large and avoided moving my mouse around aimlessly when talking (which I did during my meet and greet presentation). This helps the audience focus on what you actually want them to look and doesn’t distract them from what you’re saying.
Overall thoughts:
I’m very happy for the experience. I was nervous at first because I hadn’t done anything like this before, and it was live! I now feel confident that I can run webinars which is a great!
Thanks for reading!
