Web 2.0 Untangled: Helen Clough, Elluminate web conferencing

The next speaker, Helen Clough (http://twitter.com/helenalex), was looking at a specific situation & tool: the way the Open University uses Elluminate Web Conferencing http://www.elluminate.com/ to deliver virtual library inductions. Her presentation is on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/helenalex

The OU has around quarter of a million distance learners, and a great online library. The OU was founded with the idea of using communcations technology to enable learning- originally this meant books, TV, radio and recordings, but now they’re embracing the internet.

They’ve been using web conferencing technology to run library induction sessions. Some of the key issues they’ve found have been:

• Concentration spans- they keep all the talks an hour long at most
• The number of students who turn up- it could be 4 or 40
• Keeping it hands on- they do lots of exercises in the session, and make people communicate using lots of tick/cross exercises and emoticons
• They don’t want to be interrupted by the real world- so the trainers have a special locked office they go into when running the sessions
• They want to make their talks consistent- so they use a script

They also have a number of pre-recorded sessions. These can be used by students who can’t make one of the scheduled times, or by staff wanting to get ideas of how to run their own sessions.

They trained their staff using a mentoring scheme. First some staff learnt how to use the software and used a best practice “bible” to design talks. Then once they’d all done many talks and were confident they trained up the other staff- using a mix of reviewing pre-recorded sessions and practice sessions on other staff.

Their next step is to review the content of their sessions, as some of their newer sessions have more interactive elements that they want to put into their older sessions. They also are going to start peer reviewing their presenters to ensure consistency and help everyone develop their skills.

(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)