The Ed Techie

OU Conference - talks as separate files

Karen Cropper and Paul Harris here in IET have done sterling work in chopping up all the Elluminate sessions from the OU Conference, so you can now access each talk separately. The start and finish of each one isn't very smooth since they are taken from the larger stream, but once you get started it works well. They are all available on the OU Podcast site.

They seem to be separate files at the moment, so not embeddable, but we'll try and get around to that, but they are downloadable, so you can put them on your iPod (other devices are available) and listen whenever. Here is Jimmy Wales' talk (which I've put up in Blip.Tv), it is a bit messy at the start since we had trouble uploading his slides, so don't worry about the slides flicking around for a while. He gives a great, informal and entertaining talk:

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:

1. A questionnaire of attendees in surveymonkey
2. Statistics from cloudworks
3. Analysis of twitter users adopting the #OUConf10 hashtag
4. 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.

 

Attendance was split evenly across most sessions.

 

Most people would not have attended had it been face to face.

 

People usually combined it with an element of work.

 

The content, technology and organisation were all rated good to excellent, with discussion a bit below these.

 

In general participants thought that the conference allowed a community to form, and thought that the open nature of the conference worked well. Opinion was divided as to whether interaction was less than with a face to face conference.

 

There was strong agreement that they would attend another online conference.

We asked attendees to give us three words to describe the conference and the resultant word cloud is below:

 

Some issues raised by participants included:

• Separating out time to attend an online conference
• Perception an online conference is ‘techie’
• Possibly having shorter events but spread out over more time
• Allowing more open sessions and not just presentation

Some representative quotes from respondees are:

• "liked the accessibility factor - it saved a lot of money having to travel to Milton Keynes”
• "The moderators were excellent; very engaging, kept things going well, did a sterling job. The discussions in the text box during sessions was very good indeed. Generally the speakers and the topics covered were of great interest and engaging.”
• “This was an exceptional way to involve people outside the University and particuarly useful for CPD for those who can't afford to travel or whose institutions won't pay for them to go to conferences. A real credit to the OU's open learning ethos.”
• “thanks for the opportunity to take part. Not being part of the OU myself I welcomed the 'open invitation' and got loads out of it. Am already spreading the word!"
• “Most conferences should be presented like this in future. As well as Elluminate the various social network backchannels can be used for even more interaction”
• “Just wanted to thank all concerned for their hard work and the effort they put in to make this such a rewarding experience. I've developed some very important new contacts from the conference. I interacted much more than I would at a face-to-face conference.”
• “Excellent - from this distance I made better contact than I ever have at a conference before.”
• “It worked! - That's quite exciting! - To know that you can participate without too much stress is a big achievement for me - it takes some of the "fear factor" away”

Cloudworks Statistics

The following data was taken from the cloudworks site and are for the conference ‘cloudscape’ which is comprised of different elements, or ‘clouds’.

• No. clouds - 46
• No. comments - 168
• No. embeds - 59
• No. link - 80
• No. views of cloudscape - 2352
• No. registered users viewing - 392
• No. guests - 2852

Twitter analysis

The conference used the #OUConf10 hashtag, so anyone tweeting with this would have their tweet stored in an archive (using TwapperKeeper).

• No. twitterers using hashtag - 141
• No. tweets using hashtag - 766
• Av. no tweets per user - 5.43
• No. followers added over conference - 150

Elluminate analysis

The following data was gathered from analysing the elluminate sessions over the two days. Overall 287 people participated in at least one session.

The number of people who participated in each session are given below.

• Session 1 - 202
• Session 2 - 141
• Session 3 - 108
• Session 4 - 97

Conclusion

Overall the technology worked well, and most participants found the conference a useful and interesting experience. The number of participants was in line (if not a bit higher) than previous year's face to face conference, but the costs were considerably lower. In terms of benefit from the conference most participants gained as much, if not more, from this form.

A few small points it would be interesting to explore:

• I would like to perform more detailed analysis of the discussions in cloudworks, elluminate and twitter, but haven't had time yet.
• Some people commented that they felt more at liberty to ask questions in text chat than they do in a face to face conference.
• The cost and green comparison with previous face to face versions of the conference.

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 need to have a way to contact them outside of the platform in use, if they have not got their sound on or are having problems connecting.
• We need an agreed signal to bring to a close - the online equivalent of the 5 minute warning or card held up at conferences. (This could be achieved by placing a countdown over the top of their slides)
• It is worth including regular breaks in the programme for informal chat and a chance for ‘comfort breaks’. This should be good practice anyway in relation to looking at the screen for long periods and also the issue around comfort when wearing headphones for prolonged periods.
• Run more open, discussion based sessions, not just purely presentation based ones. As it was experimental this year, we were trying a number of different things so experimenting with the format seemed like a tweak too far, but we could do more than straightforward presentations.
• Make better use of the ‘Your contributions’ strand and provide support for this, such as video and technical teams who will help projects produce a video in the run-up to the conference. The conference becomes a means to generate content and create engagement around new technologies.
• Have a specified technical support team with clearly defined roles. As this was an experiment this year, much of the knowledge resided with the two central organisers, but as it becomes accepted practice, readily defined roles can be allocated.
• Have back up equipment ready, with several laptops.
• If bandwidth and technology allow include video and/or pictures of the presenters (and audience) as it makes the experience feel more personal.
• Presenting virtually requires slides to be more engaging than with a live audience and for the speaker to encourage interaction. We will produce a set of guidelines for virtual presentations to aid presenters. Also insist on receiving slides beforehand as uploading was not always straightforward.
• Run some hybrid sessions - for example have a number of rooms on campus where the conference is presented on a screen, with refreshments available so people can drop in. This would give some of the physical presence a traditional conference benefits from and may overcome some of the issues in people allocating time to it.

I'd welcome any other suggestions for either practical changes or more radical approaches.

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 a means of recording who intended to come to the conference (although as Cloudworks is separate from Elluminate, we don’t know if they actually did). You can also send emails to all those who have marked as attending, which was useful (see Communications below).

Within cloudworks we created the conference as a ‘cloudscape’, which essentially is an aggregation of separate elements, known as clouds. We created a number of clouds, including ones for Programme, one for each of the sessions (see Structure below), Your Contributions and Post-conference feedback.

Cloudworks allows you to embed content from other sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, etc. We added in the talks that people gave us, contributions, and interviews.

Elluminate: Although the OU has an Elluminate licence, we cannot use this for open events (because access is via the VLE requiring and OU account). Elluminate hosted it for us, setting up a different Elluminate url for each session. In the Elluminate session we recorded the event, and were then given a URL to use for playback, so people could access it after the event had finished.

Other technologies: These included Twitter (we used the hashtag #OUConf10 to track conversations), twapperkeeper which archives tweets (for the hashtag), SurveyMonkey for the post-conference questionnaire, blogs for promotion, YouTube, Slideshare, Animoto & Xtranormal (all for creating content).

Structure

The theme of the conference was ‘Learning in an open world’.

There were four live (Elluminate) conference sessions spread over two days. Each session had the same structure of three OU speakers talking for around 20 minutes each, a 40 minute discussion session, and then an external speaker (you can see the actual programme here: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/2994

The OU speakers were invited to talk as they were projects that fitted the overall theme of openness in education (eg iTunes U, SocialLearn, etc). So papers were not invited in the traditional conference manner. Instead we asked people to create multimedia contributions, such as YouTube videos and embed them in the Cloudworks space.

External speakers were invited through personal contacts, and gave their presentations from their own locations. Only one speaker was given a fee, the other talked for no cost.

Each session had 3-5 nominated ‘moderators’. These were usually ALs with experience of Elluminate. The moderators handled questions, picking up questions from the text chat window, or asking people if they wanted to ask a question over audio.

We set up some breakout rooms within Elluminate for the discussion session, but moving to these was problematic and so were only used for the first session.

There was pre and post conference activity in Cloudworks, with interviews filmed with the Vice Chancellor and others on the themes of the conference (see http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/3959) and a ‘multi-media poster’ session around the Your Contributions theme on the Friday after the conference (see http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2012

Communications

News of the conference was posted on the OU intranet site announcing the date of the conference and inviting contributions, then four follow ups with reminders and additional news. It was also listed as an 'event' in the OU calendar.

It was also announced on the TutorHome site in May and June and I did an audio interview which was published on the OU student environment, Platform

In addition, an email announcement was sent to all Deans and Directors, to the elearning community mailing list and two announcements made on the monthly elearning email news digest. Emails were also sent to contacts in the faculties who could promote the event and to faculty/unit contacts. The event was also advertised on the OU screensaver and IET internet and intranet pages and Knowledge Network.

Prior to the conference four separate blog posts were also put out here, announcing the conference, asking for contributions, announcing the agenda, and a final reminder on the eve of the conference. This was in addition to numerous messages about the conference on Twitter both prior and during the conference, using the hashtag #OUConf10. After the conference further posts were written evaluating and reflecting on the conference itself.

Within Cloudworks there is the function to email all those who have marked as attending an event. This was used to send five separate emails to attendees: detailing the agenda; asking for contributions; a reminder of the conference with practical advice on getting the most from it; a message on the morning of each day, giving the agenda and URLs again. After the conference an email was sent asking attendees to fill out the Surveymonkey questionnaire.

Planning

Two Stakeholder meetings were conducted featuring those who had an interest in the conference including some faculty representatives, communications, IT support, student services and related projects.

An open practice session in Elluminate was held the week prior to the conference, so that all speakers and moderators could check their settings, upload their presentations and discuss the practicalities of running the sessions. While all moderators joined in, only a few speakers ‘attended’.

The conference was mainly organised by one academic and one project manager (with some administrative support), with initial meetings starting in January, action review meetings every 2-3 week, and the final conference on 22-23 June 2010.

On the day the organisers set up a ‘Conference HQ’ so they were both physically located in the same room, and thus one could resolve any issues ‘in the background’ while the other continued in the virtual space.

Issues

• There were some access issues around Elluminate, particularly on campus where the proxy settings on some machines meant it wouldn’t load. The resolution was simple enough, but may have put some people off from accessing (see http://olnet.org/sites/default/files/EllumFix.pdf)
• Some speakers had poor microphone quality, which soon detracts from a purely online presentation.
• Some attendees commented that they found it difficult to isolate time and space when at work, as people assumed if they were in, they were interruptible.
• Communication could have been better and more joined up in various committees.

If you do organise an online event and use any of this (even as a model of how not to do it), then do let me know. You might like to look at the next post too, which suggests things we'd do differently next time.

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 hard to overcome it. When something is new there is an understandable tendency to take that instance as representative of the whole, in a way one never does with accepted norms. Thus if you have never met someone from a particular country people will often take the first person they meet to be representative of that nation. And yet they wouldn't expect any random person off the street to be representative of their own country. So when you are pioneering in something you have this representative burden, which I think we just have to accept, but it underlies some of the points below.

Online conferencing doesn't separate from daily tasks sufficiently - this is also one of its strengths of course, in that you can attend, when if you had to give up two or three days you may not. But a few people commented that either they weren't allowed to prioritise virtual attendance over other work, or that if they were in the office, then people assume they are interruptible. If you attend a face to face conference the physical separation immediately performs this function. I did think this was just one of those things we'll get better at, and learn ways of coping, but maybe not - the physical will always trump the virtual for attention.

Online doesn't command as much attention - on a related note, although attendance was about the same as the physical event held the previous year, I might have expected it to be higher. When you have a physical conference on campus you can't help but notice it is going on - there are signs, catering, people looking lost. A virtual conference, despite all the communications you might deploy, loses some of these cues.

Commitment to online is lower - when you are travelling to a physical conference you need to make some preparations: accommodation, transport, child care cover, etc. The beauty of an online conference is that you don't need to do all this (and thus people attend who couldn't normally). But it also means it doesn't foreground in your attention until the day. We had some people with connection problems, which was easily fixed, but because it happened on the day it was too late and they gave up. We had sent out instructions about checking the connection prior to the conference, which might be seen as the equivalent of booking your accommodation, but it doesn't register in the same way as making physical arrangements.

The camelot comparison - when being compared against an existing practice, there is a tendency sometimes to accentuate the positive elements of the entrenched practice. Not every face to face conference is a success. Not every speaker is engaging. Not every location wonderful. But the new version is often compared against the idealised version of this.

Unrealistic burdens - with new formats unrealistic demands are sometimes placed upon them which are never asked of the existing practice. An online conference doesn't need to be for everyone. Not every physical conference is meant to appeal to everyone. The whole conference format doesn't appeal to many people, but we don't hear from them, because they don't go to conferences. Some people will have a very strong preference for face to face only, which is fine. This is one way of doing conferences, it isn't trying to be the only way.

But to summarise, online conferences are different things to face to face conferences. They have different advantages, disadvantages, modes of operation, and interactions. Just as with elearning it is a mistake to only compare them with the existing practice, because it's what they do differently that's intriguing.

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 in the main sessions, and I'd need to think about how we get better engagement around them for any future conferences, because many of them are excellent. But what I wanted to do in this post was pull in a few of them and what thoughts they had given rise to. What is key in this is that the format really helps. It's almost like, erm, the medium is the message.

First up is something very simple, but it made me reflect on how important personal contact is. Heather Richardson, a tutor on the creative writing course, created a short hello video for her students and showed them around some of the course materials.

During the conference a number of people said how good it was when the speaker put up a photo of themselves, just so they could make that human connection. I think Heather's video is a good example of this. It is also important that it isn't a course team video, but that it comes from the tutor as this is the student's point of contact. I think it's also significant in that it isn't high quality video production - the implicit message in this video is that I'm one of you, and also, you could do this too. I'd like to see more tutors doing this sort of thing.

The second video is from Janet Haresnape which sets out an activity for demonstrating genetic drift in evolution. The audio quality isn't great, but I think it's a really good experiment. With a day's recording effort and input from one AV professional I reckon we'd have a useful learning resource that many others could use. And there must be many more examples like this around. What we need is for people like Janet to have a go at creating something and then the OU can pick some to add a bit more gloss to and you'd have more 'learning objects' than we ever got from learning object approaches.

In the next clip Jennefer Hart asks 'What is  design atelier?'. This is part of a research project, and what I like about this short movie is that it isn't telling you about the project but rather prompting you to think about it. One could imagine taking this to the next step and asking people to respond with a YouTube clip and then you'd have a nice playlist, which becomes a meaningful resource.

Creating adverts or promotional videos for courses is something we'll see more of (both Tony Hirst and Alec Couros have started doing really good ones). This one from Giselle Ferreira is exactly the sort of thing I have in mind.

And lastly, mainly to wind up AJ Cann, here is an excellent video about the Second Life activity for postgrad students:

Now I could have got all this from traditional papers, but I think asking for multimedia content had two key benefits for me: firstly it encouraged some people to produce content when they hadn't before; secondly seeing the content made me think about how the OU can use and generate digital artefacts in different ways.

I've only picked out a few contributions here to make some more general points, they're all worth looking at.

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 is 400 users, on a first come, first served basis.

See you on the other side!

June 22nd Morning - Open Content

You need to log into Elluminate here: 

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=cpp1&password=M.698B12259317B5E61C82621C5E0A7A

• 9.30 - 10.00 Welcome to conference - Martin Weller
• 10.00 - 11.00 OU Presentations:
  Cloudworks (Grainne Conole)
  iTunes U (Peter Scott)
  SCORE (Chris Pegler)
• 11.00 -11.40 Moderated discussion - in separate 'rooms' in elluminate
• 11.40 - 12.30 - external speaker: Prof. Frank Rennie (UHI)

June 22nd Afternoon - Open Learning

You need to log into Elluminate here:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=cpp1&password=M.694D972D3E96B7AC0FA57F5D1D56A2

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU presentations:
  SocialLearn (Simon Buckingham Shum)
  OpenLearn (Laura Dewis)
  OLNet (Patrick McAndrew)
• 2.30 - 3.15  Moderated discussion
• 3.15 - 4.30 External speaker - George Siemens (Athabasca)

June 23rd Morning - Open Teaching

You need to log into Elluminate here:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=cpp1&password=M.CBE6F6FED2FF061AE4BD391A790598

• 9.30 - 10.30 OU Presentations:
  Creating open courses (Tony Hirst)
  Digital Humanities & Classics Confidential (Linda Wilks/Elton Barker)
  Open to knowing about climate change (Joe Smith)
  
  
• 10.30 - 11.15  Moderated discussion
• 11.15 - 12.00 - External speaker: Helen Milner, UK Online Centres

June 23rd Afternoon - Open Access

You need to log into Elluminate here:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.9DDE389EFCE7B76F7880AE9C0939F4

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU Presentations:
  iSpot (Doug Clow)
  The OU in Africa - HEAT (Alison Robinson)
  Open CETL (Steve Swithenby)
• 2.30 - 3.15 Moderated discussion
• 3.15- 4.00 Closing Talk: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
• 4.00 - 4.30 - wrap up, Martin Weller

Open Conference video interviews

I conducted a set of interviews for the OU Conference. They all focused around the same 4 questions:

• What are the benefits of technology for learning?
• What are the interesting areas around openness at the moment?
• Are there any interesting trends we should watch over the next few years?
• What do you think about the open, online approach of the conference?

I interview our Vice Chancellor, Martin Bean, as well as Grainne Conole, Simon Buckingham-Shum and Andrew Law.

They raise some great points, including the impact of social networks, dimensions of openness, moving beyond simple sharing of data, and changes in the nature of conferences. It was intriguing how the same questions elicited very different responses. If anyone else fancies answering these questions from their perspective, please share with us, it'd be a great resource.

You can see the videos in this playlist:

I am the weak link I'm afraid, a career as interviewer does not beckon. But if you like watching a boring middle-aged man wearing a slightly snug tank top and waving his hands around, you've hit pay-dirt.

The documentally experience

I finally got to meet Documentally (Christian Payne) today when he was on campus doing some interviews for the OU Platform, after having always missed each other in the past. In exchange for a coffee Robyn Slingsby roped me in for a quick interview. So here I am talking about the OU conference in Audioboo:

OU conference agenda - officially awesome

As you may know I am organising the annual OU conference this year: Learning in an Open World. It is online only (in Elluminate and Cloudworks), and open to all to attend (not just OU people).

It is based around four sessions over the 22nd-23rd June and the theme is exploring Openness in Education. Each session has three OU speakers talking about a specific project. There is then a moderated discussion session where people can go into one of three (or so) Elluminate rooms to discuss issues from the talks. Then everyone 'reconvenes' for an external speaker.

I've just released the agenda, which may be subject to some change, but at the moment looks like that below. I think it's a good line-up exhibiting work the OU is doing in relation to the theme of openness, and a great group of external speakers.

If you fancy being part then register in Cloudworks and mark as attending on the Cloudworks page. At the moment the Elluminate sessions are set to a limit of 300 users (managing discussion becomes difficult beyond this), but if we look like getting more we can investigate alternatives, so it's useful for us to know who is planning to attend. We will record the sessions also, so you can play them back later, if you can't make it.

June 22nd Morning - Open Content

• 9.30 - 10.00 Welcome to conference - Martin Weller
• 10.00 - 11.00 OU Presentations:
  Cloudworks (Grainne Conole)
  iTunes U (Peter Scott)
  SCORE (Chris Pegler)
• 11.00 -11.40 Moderated discussion - in separate 'rooms' in elluminate
• 11.40 - 12.30 - external speaker: Prof. Frank Rennie (UHI)

June 22nd Afternoon - Open Learning

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU presentations:
  SocialLearn (Simon Buckingham Shum)
  OpenLearn (Laura Dewis)
  OLNet (Patrick McAndrew)
• 2.30 - 3.15  Moderated discussion
• 3.15 - 4.30 External speaker - George Siemens (Athabasca)

June 23rd Morning - Open Teaching

• 9.30 - 10.30 OU Presentations:
  Creating open courses (Tony Hirst)
  Digital Humanities (Linda Wilks/Elton Barker)
  Open CETL (Steve Swithenby)
• 10.30 - 11.15  Moderated discussion
• 11.15 - 12.00 - External speaker: Anne Faulkner, UK Online Centres

June 23rd Afternoon - Open Access

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU Presentations:
  iSpot (Doug Clow)
  The OU in Africa - HEAT (Lesley-Anne Long)
  Researching the Environment in the open (Joe Smith)
• 2.30 - 3.15 Moderated discussion
• 3.15- 4.00 Closing Talk: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
• 4.00 - 4.30 - wrap up, Martin Weller