Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Preparing for my Guest Speaker session!


Blogging on the topic of peer mentoring over the past few weeks has already provided me with the elements to be incorporated into the webinar I will present on the 14th March.  Luckily I am not too apprehensive about presenting my findings online having consulted customers on how to host and facilitate webinars during my time at WebEx, but I still have an entire activity plan created to ensure that it is a success.  

The success of any webinar is in the way you market it and this will be done by posting my blurb as an announcement to all cohorts on my course, but also to other cohorts who frequently use another university site- The Edinburgh Napier Education Exchange. This was already in my activity plan and I will also be running a discussion after my first webinar to understand what my peers think of the topic of peer mentoring. It is all about gather more information to support the proposal I plan to present during my 2nd webinar.  I will use the Universities Online collaboration tool Elluminate, which I have some experience of using. Thankfully most of the online collaboration tools available have almost identical features sets.  It is how you use these features, which contributes to the success of any webinar regardless of the topic.

Yes, I have attempted to write a blurb and what do I hope to achieve by doing this? Well, I hope that it will spark some interest to join the session and not only take away something new about peer mentoring, but also contribute through feedback during  and post webinar to  a possible implementation of a mentoring scheme for cohorts on the MSc BOE.  I am not sure what to expect qua feedback, but will create moments in my webinar for responses and the next few days will be spent thinking about the questions to pose to the cohorts after they have attended my 60 minutes of fame. My 60 minutes of fame as a guest speaker will need to be evaluated and I am also looking at possible question to add to my evaluation questionnaire as well as thinking about the number of questions, the question types and how I will use this feedback.

There are a number of tools out there and I have already been toying with the idea of using one of the following:
  • SurveyMonkey
  • Google Forms
These are two tools that I already know and I will opt for a tool I am comfortable using for this first webinar, but one of the opportunities I could take advantage of is to try other tools, but rather than me searching for a suitable tool I decided to tap in to the Social Networking world and pose a question to one of the communities I am a member of on Yammer to see what a group of 1, 280 members has to say about evaluation tools.  The feedback brought with it an interesting mix of tools 




Through doing some research it was stated that the two were regarded as basic survey tools and SurveyMonkey also featured here too. Two other tools mentioned were regarded as lower class integrated tools: 

Evaluating the success of a mentoring scheme will include some type of evaluation and this is certainly feature in my list of recommendations to the programme leaders. Which tool is going to be the interesting question and challenge I now have. 

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