Jim Rogers  – College of Social Science – School of Health and Social Care – Staff profile

Jim Rogers is a Senior Lecturer within the School of Health and Social Care, and ran a whole school team meeting using Collaborate Ultra. Here are his thoughts on how well this worked for the team.

Collaborate was used on Wednesday 25th March for a whole school team meeting. The school admin office sent out the link several days in advance and the scheduled session took place with over 90 staff in attendance.  Using the scheduled session allowed us to record the session and to easily generate reports of attendance .

The head of school led the meeting and we had two staff acting as moderators who provided additional monitoring of the chat. It was useful for the head of school to be able to communicate latest developments to all staff, and to receive questions and feedback in real time. From the feedback from participants, the most useful thing seemed to be the opportunity to connect with each other, via the chat function.

A few staff had problems with the audio function. In most cases this was quickly resolved by advising them to switch to a Chrome browser. We communicated to all staff that a recording would be available and the link to the recording was sent out straight after the meeting.

A number of the staff have also been using the system for teaching purposes and this is generally working well. Attendance at sessions seems comparable to normal in class attendance. The system replicates in many ways the class room dynamics with those who usually speak in class being the ones to use the chat function the most. Students seem reluctant to use the microphone even when given the opportunity to do so.

We have formed an evaluation group and are working on a Qualtrix survey for staff and students across the college. We have checked with ethics and have the permission to go ahead with this as a piece of research/evaluation. This seems like a big natural experiment and it will be useful to capture data

If you would like support using Collaborate Ultra please either contact digitaleducation@lincoln.ac.uk