Running live courses and webinars

A course (programme) holds a series of sessions. Connect Google Meet and attendance is worked out from the joining records for you.

How a course is put together

The "programme" is what people sign up to, and it holds the price, the capacity and the enrolment window. Underneath it sit "sessions", one for each time you go live. On longer courses you can group sessions into "sections", which work like chapters.

For a one-off webinar, a programme with a single session under it is all you need.

Connecting Google Meet

To have attendance recorded for you, connect a Google account first. Go to "Google Meet and API settings" and follow the prompts to authorise it. We use only the permissions needed to create meetings and add them to a calendar.

Afterwards you can press "Test" to check the connection, and "Test meeting creation" to confirm that a meeting can actually be created.

Creating a programme

You can leave a programme as a draft while you work on it and publish once the details are settled.

Creating sessions

Each session has its own date and delivery method. Where Google Meet is connected, the meeting link is created for you.

Once a session is set up, press "Sync to calendar". It is added to Google Calendar and invitations go out to the instructors and learners.

Recording attendance

After the session, open it and press "Import attendance". We pull each participant's join time, leave time and total time in the room from Google Meet, and anyone who was present for at least the time you set is recorded as attending.

Where someone had connection trouble, your staff can adjust their record individually. Both per-session attendance and overall progress export to CSV, which is what most people use for certificates and for keeping records.

Managing learners

Everyone who signs up appears under "Learner CRM". You can follow them through stages such as enrolled, in progress and completed, and tag them by industry or interest so you can pick out who to invite next time.

Where people arrive from advertising, the source is recorded, so you can compare sign-ups and completion rates by channel. Individual conversations can be kept as notes, which helps when handing a learner over to a colleague.

How people tend to use it

For a free one-off webinar, a free programme with a capacity and a single session, fronted by a landing page, is easy to run. The people who come through it sit in the CRM ready for an invitation to a paid course later.

For a course running over several weeks, group the sessions into sections and set completion to something like six sessions or more. For internal training, unlisted programmes with the attendance report exported to CSV is the usual pattern.