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OU conference – evaluation
Following on from the previous two posts looking at the OU conference, this final one in the trilogy looks at some evaluation. I am particularly indebted to Karen Cropper, Rebecca Ferguson and Juliette Culver for doing much of the analysis for this post. Evaluation took four main forms: A questionnaire of attendees in surveymonkey Statistics from cloudworks Analysis of twitter users adopting the #OUConf10 hashtag Analysis of the elluminate sessions Questionnaire There were 102 responses to the questionnaire. Below are some charts representing salient issues: Most attendees were central staff, but there was a significant audience that had no connection to the OU, and a mix across other categories.…
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OU conference – areas for improvement
In my last post I set out how we organised the conference, in this one I'll suggest (with input from Karen) some things we might do differently next time. Ensure that speakers have good mic and earphones and have practiced in Elluminate beforehand. Unless they are experienced with presenting online, it is probably a good idea to insist on practice session. If speakers are based in the same location then it might be better for them to be in the same or nearby room. The same applies for any standby speaker ready to step in if there are problems with the advertised speaker. If speakers are in other locations, we…
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How to organise an online conference
Or rather, how we (which is Karen Cropper and I) organised the OU online conference this year. You might like to take this as a template to use if you're thinking of running a similar event, although obviously you may want to vary the technologies, structure, etc. This is the first in a series of posts on the conference which will cover organisation, suggestions for improvement and evaluation. Technology We used two main technologies: Cloudworks and Elluminate The Cloudworks site acted as the main web site and the asynchronous discussion forum. We set it up as an ‘event’, which adds in a button ‘Mark as attending’, so we had…
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The Podstars lessons
I mentioned a while back that I was running an internal project called 'Podstars'. This ties into the whole digital scholarship/new digital outputs agenda. The title is somewhat misleading since the aim of the project was not to create online broadcast celebrities, but rather to raise the profile of producing new kinds of stuff for academics. In the project we asked for volunteers, and then gave Flip cams to 16 academics. We got them together for an initial meeting, showed them the basic video editing software, talked through what they wanted to do and showed some good examples of videos and tools they might use. We then had a mid-project…
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Projects, innovation & the small price of a coffee
<Image coffee love http://www.flickr.com/photos/javaturtle/133316103/> Stephen Downes pointed at this piece from Tony Bates arguing that the choice facing higher education institutions is often phrased as one of 'innovate or die'. It prompted me to blog some half baked thoughts I'd had around innovation recently. In my presentation on Academic output as collateral damage I suggested that organisations like projects. They are set up to work with project structures, which have lines of responsibility, a set of deliverables, milestones, and fixed budgets. I understand this and for a lot of tasks it is the best way to work. But here are three statements I would like to put forward: 1) The small…
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Thoughts on digital scholarship
I am giving a presentation on digital scholarship tomorrow at the OU, but in order to save people you know, actually turning up, here is the slidecast. I'm putting together a book proposal around digital scholarship which will build on some content from this blog and explore some of these ideas, so the presentation was really a way to start exploring some of these ideas. The audio is a bit quiet but the slides are reasonably self-explanatory anyway. This is really an amalgamation of other bits, so not a lot new here, but it's a bit more than old wine in a new bottle. What I'm interested in is whether…
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Online conferences & the legitimacy deficit
(Wordle of OU Conference – we asked participants to give us 3 words describing it) In the second post following up on the OU online conference, I want to explore some issues around perceptions of online conferences. The feedback from the conference thus far has been almost entirely positive (I'll blog the questionnaire results later), but I have also picked up a couple of issues which I think are worth pulling out. It strikes me that in some ways online conferences are in a similar position to distance learning 40 years ago, or elearning 10 years ago. They have a legitimacy deficit to some, and thus have to work extra…
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Some thoughts on open conference contributions
Over the next few posts I'll be commenting on aspects of the Open University conference which I've just finished running. You can view the playback of all sessions from here. I'll cover reflections on the conference and what we did in separate posts. In this one I wanted to look at some of the contributions we got from people in Cloudworks. We had a fixed agenda of speakers (I thought multiple strands would be too confusing in Elluminate), but asked for multi-media contributions from anyone, highlighting their project. You can see all the contributions here. To be honest I don't think we used these as well as we could have…
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The ups & downs of embracing unpredictability
In a recent presentation I argued that producing low cost content as a by-product allowed institutions to embrace unpredictability, in a way they can't do when spending large sums of money on content. If you are spending a decent amount of money you need a project, with identified target customers, objectives, key performance indicators, a budget, lines of responsibility, etc. But a lot of the fun stuff online happens unpredictably. The makers of Downfall didn't intend for it to be an internet meme after all (and then blew their chance when it became one). As John Naughton puts it the net is "a global machine for springing surprises". In a…
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OU Conference – agenda (and backup)
Tomorrow is the OU Conference, which we're running in Elluminate and Cloudworks. The final agenda is below, if you haven't seen it. We're seeing this as an experiment this year and so will be evaluating it. An open online conference plays into a few agendas at the moment: economical; green ICT & impact. After the conference I am going to outline what we've done so others can use it. Oh, and this post is also acting as a backup in case Cloudworks should fall over. Note that each session has a separate Elluminate URL (so we can record them and release as separate resources), and the limit for each session…
