Recycling webinar recordings

We record so many webinars and although there are many who watch these recordings there may be other ways of reusing them. I wrote a blogpost on this theme recently, Recycling webinars, and a few days later I got a link from our project partners at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm showing how they have used the recording of our webinar from the Introduction to urology MOOC. They have reused our recording to make a film showing teachers how to organise a webinar with tips on layout, structure and methodology.

Thank you to Eva Lorentzon and the learning technologists at Karolinska Institute University Library for telling us about this excellent spin-off to our project.

Webinar in a MOOC

We helped Karolinska Institute arrange a webinar as part of their MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Introduction to Urology which ran Sept – Nov 2015. Here are Maria Kvarnström’s reflections on the experience.

A long time has now passed the webinar on Karolinska Institute’s MOOC Introduction to urology took place. However better late than never (!) and here are some of our thoughts on the webinar we offered as part of the MOOC.

We think that the webinar went really well in terms of interesting discussions and creating an inclusive atmosphere for the participants who seem to appreciate getting the opportunity to meet the course instructor in person for a live event – an extra dimension to a MOOC! We prepared very thoroughly with special attention on dealing with large numbers of participants. We decided to put a limit of 300 simultaneous participants and close the webinar room when that level was reached. This was we were not sure about how the performance of the room would be affected with so many participants. We had also worked out methods for saving valuable bandwidth with a mass audience: low quality video, only one video stream in operation, if necessary freezing the video, reducing presentation file size etc. 

Partner Blog: Eimskip tries webinars when handling dangerous cargo

Eimskip´s Lagarfoss and Harpa the Reykjavik Concert hall.

Eimskip offers employees training through various courses and seminars, with most of them being classroom training. Recently we’ve been exploring the possibilities in offering online courses and webinars. We saw an opportunity in taking part in „Nordplus – Webinar Project“  with the following objectives in mind:

• Create a template and guidelines for webinars
• Understand and become familiar with the tools to increase interactivity and make webinars interesting
• Understand, practice and become comfortable in the role of a webinar leader
• Independently develop material and framework for webinars aimed at other target groups
• Reach more customers/employees, especially those who do not have time or ability to participate in face-to-face meetings or seminars

We put together a team of people that were expected to be able to take advantage of the methodology and have webinar experience. Their role was to identify Eimskip’s needs in terms of webinars, share their experiences of conducting online training and propose courses (seminars) which could be utilized as a test course.

Partner blog – lessons learned 2015

One of our partner organisations is The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise – Insurance Information to Employers. Here is an interview with Julia Utbult and Åsa Blomberg reflecting on their webinar development during 2015.

What was the aim of your webinar initiative and how successful have you been so far?

We have been running traditional training for a long time now with on-site meetings as well as telephone and e-mail contact. We are responsible for providing clear information about our services to a large customer base and we are interested in investigating new methods and opportunities. Webinars seemed attractive in several ways: a new and modern way to work, relatively easy to set up, a quick and effective way of informing our customers and the opportunity to save money because neither we nor our customers need to travel.

Partner blog: Collaborative online course – a pilot

The potato webinar got many interested participants.

Our external Norwegian project partner, Studiesenteret.no, wanted to make an online course based on three webinars. They are at the starting line of establishing an online senior university. After some preparations they decided that they would rather make a pilot with a smaller number of participants than their original plan to provide a fully-fledged course. The pilot became a Nordic experiment, with the organizer located in North-Norway, the lecturers in Iceland, the technical support in South-Norway, and the participants scattered in the north and south of Norway and Sweden.

HOW
The pilot had a simple course design with the “LMS” in a Facebook group, the lectures on Thursday evenings in May and June, for one and a half hour, not much home work, and no final test.

INTERACTIVITY
As this was part of our webinar project where we try to develop interactivity and collaboration. Facilitating interaction was of course important, using for example polls on relevant issues, small assignments done by the lecturer, and discussions in small slots.

Partner blog – Riding the webinar learning curve

One of our partner organisations is The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise – Insurance Information to Employers. Here is Julia Utbult’s fifth post reflecting on their webinar development.

Time flies and so do our thoughts. We have moved from running trial webinars to implementing them into our ordinary offers for our customers. We are experiencing that the more we let go and just do, the better webinars we have. It is easier to deal with technical difficulties, moments of silence and the thoughts on how to build a webinar.

Our next step is to involve more of our colleagues into holding webinars/acting as speaker and host. Today I am on a train from Linköping, where I have had a meeting with a colleague that will do a webinar with me and Åsa (my partner in crime when it comes to webinars) two days from now. We looked at Adobe Connect, built an agenda and decided on roles in one hour. It feels amazing, and so much easier than I had expected. The more confident I feel about hosting webinars, the easier it is to run and engage others in running them.

I have had several discussions with another company that will use webinars in a similar way that we do. The discussions with them have been inspiring and led to that we both have learned a lot from each other. We are all new users of Adobe Connect and together we have been able to formulate questions and needs together. That have helped us to be “better” customers who can express specific needs and questions in a more specific way towards our support provider, who in turn has been able to supply us with what we need in terms of help. It is weird how hard it is to ask the right questions, but the more you know, the easier it is to be more specific.

Testing the WEbigagement

Brock Online Academy has tested the webigagemodel. We ran our first webigage webinar on August 7. Topic was to present the LMS Moodle to teachers and get them well on board. We applyed 2 steps of our webigage-model.

First we informed and provided the participants with our Pre-Webinar Guidelines.

Then we applied step 1 and step 2 from the webigagemodel.

Step 1 Board and Play – here the participants need to get on board the webinar system and discover the meeting room by socializing with pods like: ’How is the weather’, ’Your webinar experience’. We did that by testing some of the easy pods such as ‘Status Icons’ by asking ’If they had had a nice summerholiday’. The purpose was to make participants play with the pods to make them feel safe on board the webinar system.

Step 2 Contribute Online – here the participants are expected to interact with the content. We did that by inviting to chats on the subject and ran some polls on their experiences with e.g. types of LMS’s.

Our next webinar will try and apply all 4 steps of the webigagemodel.

Partner blog – The live webinar of the KI Urology MOOC – no turning back!

Image: Peter Stedt, Johan Inganni, Karolinska Institute (with permission)

The project is helping to run a webinar on a major MOOC from Karolinska Institute, Introduction to Urology. Here’s an update from our partner there, Maria Kvarnström.

Time flies and next week (September 28th) it is time for our webinar in the MOOC Introduction to urology!

Still it does seem like a good idea; to offer interaction and a chance to “meet” the course instructor in a live event would hopefully give an extra dimension to the experience of the course. However, it also feels a bit like throwing ourselves out in the open where anything could happen (!) but as we are brave and really want to “meet” the participants we will do it!

Partner blog – Karolinska Institute, Stockholm

We have another exciting partner in the project, Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute, who are planning to use webinars in a MOOC with thousands of participants. This involves new challenges .

Planning for a webinar during a live MOOC – exciting and challenging

Maria Kvarnström (Karolinska Institute)

Karolinska Institute’s CLK (Center for Learning and Knowledge) in conjunction with Professor Lars Henningsohn will offer a MOOC called Introduction to Urology, open to a wide variety of participants from all over the world. We hope the course will appeal to both the general public as well as clinical health care students and we aim to provide a learning journey that will be interesting as well as challenging. To optimize the experience we would like to offer an opportunity to get together and meet the course instructors for an interactive session – a webinar!

Partner blog – going live

One of our partner organisations is The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise – Insurance Information to Employers. Here is Julia Utbult’s fourth post reflecting on their first live webinar with customers.

Now we have laid the foundations of our work with webinars. We have started on a basic level with limited interaction. I think I need to become comfortable first before I do too much and invite too high level of interaction. I believe that the more we get used to the tool Adobe Connect and the more comfortable we become with talking out loud to a computer – the easier it will feel and the more interaction with participants we can handle. We have decided to go along with exactly the same concept for our first five webinars. During the time we will think about and decide on topics and times for webinars this fall.

We have experienced a lot of technical bumps and it is a lot to think about, sizes and formats on videos, cameras that “freeze” flash installations and our firewall that blocks unexpected things. I’m no tech freak – so all this causes a lot of confusion and uncertainty. But I hope I will get used to it and find my way through all popups and weird things happening. How I wish I was better at all computer stuff and that our company did not have such rigorous firewalls etc.!