Online Lectures

Jackie, zoom lectures can be either meetings (audience can see each other) or webinars (audience cannot See each other). From my experience, most lecturers prefer meetings as they like to see people….but if high numbers watching on zoom, webinars are easier to handle. Hope that helps.

We are now inviting care home residents to join our lectures and visits for free. We should have thought of that ages ago. We’ve also renewed contact with our local Art College.

When you are setting up your Zoom Webinar you must enable the Practice Session and the Q&A option and also email the special link that your lecturer and other panelists need in order to join the Practice Session. Your attendees join the Webinar only after you close the Practice Session.

Hello Richard. I am a lecturer lecturing online publicly every Friday morning but I also offer private talks for Art Societies. I have explored that approach for my own online talks but have decided against it for several reasons. Firstly, it risks our intellectual property falling into the wrong hands. Our lectures could easily be shared and potentially copied. It also makes things more difficult regarding copyright of the images. Secondly, it takes away the opportunity for a Live Q&A session at the end of the talk, or for the Chair to introduce the talk at the beginning. Thirdly, it removes the feeling of a community. Many of my regular listeners are above the age of 60 and some live alone. They enjoy the live element of the talks because they know that their friends are sitting down at exactly the same time to watch the talk. I have friendship groups that watch the talks and then discuss the works afterwards. In this challenging time I think it's important to try to establish some sense of community. I hope this helps! With best wishes, Stella Grace Lyons www.stellagracelyons.co.uk

Live online lectures are essentially a slide show with commentary and as such could be recorded and distributed to a society’s membership using a Cloud system. A local Society could buy the lecture from the lecturer on the basis that it is for distribution to its members only.

This provides the benefit of not having to coordinate a set date and time for the lecturer and the society members and avoids the use of Zoom which can problematic for some.

Has anyone explored this approach?

I'm unclear. Is the webinar option through the Arts Society? Can the local society host the Arts Society webinar option? How are questions asked in the webinar option, is it via text chat or members asking their own questions live?

We had a committee meeting yesterday and were discussing what our approach should be come our new season starting in October. We're thinking about going with on line lectures for October, November, December and then wondering whether we might be able to get into a 'hybrid' model after that of a lecturer in our village hall, with a small, socially distanced audience (if that's what we're still doing!) and filming/streaming to our other members on line. Is this going to be technically challenging? What do people think of this idea and might it be something the centre could facilitate as a step towards normality?

The list of lecturers able to do online lectures is in the Directory of Lecturers. Choose the ‘true’ option in the last search box on the front page and all their names appear. Excellent.

I'm glad to hear that your first Zoom lecture went well!

Talking to Katherine at Guilford Street today, about 25 lecturers have signed up as ready to do online lectures for Societies. Katherine would be able to give you names, but is expecting the list to expand over the next week or so.

Hello, yes the lecturers have used zoom so far and there has been a successful trial of using Youtube for a society lecture today. The quality of audio does depend on the mic that the lecturer uses as well as the audio capabilities of each individuals laptop/ mobile device used to to view the lecture.

Many thanks

From what I understand two other societies have used, one lecturer used Zoom, and the other today gave members the choice of using either Webinar or Zoom. Certainly the Webinar site produced excellent sound and vision. It is probably a case of asking the lecturer.