 60 coming up now and we had about 340 people registered for this webinar. It is rather a coincidence that when we planned this webinar we didn't expect the coronavirus to hit the world and the world to be at a standstill and everybody locked in at home. I don't know if anyone could possibly expect that. And this subject has become extremely topical to say the least. So a great response and exceptional circumstances because in many countries of course everybody is working from home and the sort of, some people are, you know, there's a lot of overload on the networks and the tools that we're using. My name is Alistair Creelman. I work at Linnaeus University in the southeast of Sweden. I am a member of the Eden NAP committee and also the ITHU, the network for IT in higher education here in Sweden. And just I will immediately show you. This is the topic of today's webinar, organizing digital conferences, experience and opportunities. We are a number of people from the network for higher education in, for IT in higher education in Sweden. And we have run together with the Swedish Higher Education Authority, a couple of digital conferences, which we would like to tell you about how we did it and some of our experience and how that can be built upon. So this is a joint effort between Eden and ITHU. I would just like to introduce my co-speakers today and first of all Andrea. Just a little bit about yourself. Yes, hello, my name is Andrea and I work for the Swedish Higher Education Authority, a government organization that is dealing with higher education in Sweden. And I also was the project manager for this virtual conference. Okay, Begita. Hello everybody, Begita Hemingsson. I work at Midsweden University as an educational developer. And I'm also the chair of ITHU Swedish Network for IT in higher education. And I'm also a member of the steering committee of TF Edu at Giante. And right now I'm also a consultant for virtual conferences at the Swedish Higher Education Authority. And the Marcus? Yes, Marcus Schneider, my name. I work at Karlsdor University, which is approximately the middle between Oslo and Stockholm. I'm here at the Center for Teaching and Learning. And part time I'm working with the Swedish NREN, the National Research and Education Network. That's called SUNED as a product owner for the media services, which include PlayService and Zoom right now. We're quite happy. Alistair. Okay, I have one feature of the Eden webinars is that you are able to claim a badge for your participation. And if you want to claim a badge for your participation, you click on the link that is now in the group chat. You access the chat with the button at the bottom of the screen, the chat button. And I've just posted that link. And if you click there, you just put your email address and we will send you a badge showing that you have participated in this meeting and we will repeat that link at the end. So in this session, we're going to be doing, we're going to tell you a little bit about how we organize these conferences. Some of the issues we met, some of the challenges and how we dealt with them from different perspectives, from the organizer's perspective, from a little bit from the technical perspective and very much from the participant's perspective. And we'll also be giving you a chance to try out some different ideas. We're going to let you just a second. We're going to give you a chance to, first of all, focus on why do we go to conferences at all? What do we get out of this? And I'm going to share my screen and give you a chance to do some interaction. Hold on a second. There. If you have another device or on the device you're on that you go to menti.com and use the code 252836, why do you attend online on-site conferences? What are the main things you want to get out of a conference? And then we'll think about how do we do that in the virtual world? So a quick little bit of brainstorming. Take your mobile or open a tab in your browser. Go to menti.com, code 252836 and just give us some words. Get inspired. Networking. Could you put the link in the chat as well, Alistair? Because I've got some requests there. Sorry, you won't see my 252836. Can somebody put that in there? Could you put that in the chat? Otherwise, I have to change my, the code is 252836. I think it's on the shared screen. Yeah, there it is. So it's networking. I'd, Marcus, Brigitte, fairly expected answers. Yeah, carbon footprint, new ideas, personal contact. They're rolling in very quickly. What's interesting is that actually not many people say listen to keynote speakers. Or to PowerPoint. It's very much about being social. It's about networking. It's about getting ideas. It's being inspired. And that could come from keynote speakers as well. But you can see that it's very much about the social aspect. And I think many people feel that that's what's missing in the online environment. So I will just stop that sharing because now we will move over to the story behind our conferences and how we tried to get the feelings that you're talking about there in that poll. How did we get that into a virtual, a digital space? So I'd like to hand over to Andrea. Yes, thank you. Did you see, can you see in my PowerPoint now? Perfectly. Yes, perfect. So I hope everything technical will work. So as you all mentioned, a certain dimension of conferences is networking and being social. And of course, it was the same for me. I have organized several conferences before for the Nordic Council of Ministers, for example. So I'm used to organizing conferences, nothing new. But this was something new. So suddenly we were in the position to create a digital conference, a virtual conference. And we did this in September 2019, only half a year ago, but it feels like 20 years ago. And here you see a picture of how a setup like this can what it can look like. So maybe I just mentioned, Alistair, you wanted to mention just some words about what it entailed. Yes. So I mean, the conference, what we actually did was that this conference was a joint effort between the two parties that you can see. And if you just click on, the subject was teaching and learning in higher education. And this was part of a national assignment that the government had given the Swedish Higher Education Authority to investigate. So this, as Andrea will mention later, this was very much a high stakes conference because it was about teaching and learning. It was involving all of the Swedish universities. We used Zoom as a platform like this, and we had 500 registered participants. We put a limit on that because the webinar room that we were using couldn't take any more than that. We had both plenary sessions and parallel sessions. And in the parallel sessions, we arranged small group discussions, as we will try to do with you later on just today. We also included social activities during the lunchtime. And that was a big risk for us. We weren't sure how people would react, but it was a big success. We had, you could eat a lunch together with sort of seven or eight partners from around the country. And I did that at my desk here. We also offered sort of office aerobics session, some mindfulness. And there was even a cafe where you could improve your conversational German with Andrea and Marcus leading that. And those were very, very popular. So people did socialize. We did a similar conference just about a week ago, which was a follow-up to that conference. Not quite as many participants, but still several hundred. Next picture. So just to show you a little bit, if you can see here, we made the program quite simple. The participants went to the website and there they could see the conference program. And there were links, there was a different zoom link for each session. So all you did was you looked at the program, click the link and in you went. We even had a lobby and help desk at the beginning of the day where people could check in and test their equipment and make sure everything was working. And the help desk was open all day long for anyone who had any problems. If you clicked on one of the sessions, you would then go to another page where you got all the background information about the session, who was going to be leading it, how you prepare for the session and documentation for that session. So you got a full conference experience. Back to you, Andrea. Yeah, so how did we start all of this? As you can imagine as a government organization, we are not always this experimental. So it was, how did we even get the idea? And of course it wasn't my idea as the project manager, but this idea came to us in actually in a meeting on a real conference. You see a picture here of me. This is me. How I normally conduct conferences. And maybe it reminds you of your own way of conducting conferences, maybe as a speaker or sitting in the audience. So this is me normally in a conference situation. So in one of the breaks on in such an occasion, we were talking, I was talking to some member of the IT in higher education here in Sweden. And I wanted as part of the government assignment that I was given on educational development. I wanted to work with all the stakeholders in Sweden and create conferences and for platforms together where we could discuss different topics on development, educational development. And I also wanted to create a conference with IT in higher education. And I asked them what if they had any ideas. And they said, yeah, we have always wanted to try to create a virtual conference. And I had never even been to a webinar a year and a half ago. So for me, that was just a crazy idea. What would what does it even mean? I don't know how what would it look like? What would I need? Would it work? What would we who needs to participate? So it from the beginning, I thought it's a crazy idea. And then I started thinking and talking to the people at IT in higher education. And then I thought, yeah, OK, why not? Let's try it because sometimes you have to try things that you do not really dare to do. So yes, let's let's try it and do it together. And then we committed to the task and that is really important to to be clear on this that when you want to to start something like a virtual conference is not a webinar. It needs a lot of planning. It is very, very stressful, but it's also great fun. So but you need to be committed to the task when you start on this journey because it would be easy to to give up at any point. Support from the management in the organization was really essential. It would not be it would not be possible in my opinion to create a virtual conference with all that it needs and entails if you do not have the backup and complete backing of your director general or head of department. So you need the approval and support of your management to do it. You also have to create trust and cooperation. So you need to trust the management needs to trust me as the project manager to be able to to to create this together with other people. And also I need to trust it to create trust to the other people to the team I was working with and to learn how to work in this kind of corporation that it needs to create a virtual conference because no one can do it on their own. No one has the expertise. So you need to to work in a different way and create a different kind of process. So this means a different kind of leading a process of innovation of constant innovation. And it is stressful, but it also very, very much fun. So, of course, it took us some investments and I want to show you from some kind of before and after picture. As I told you, this is me before the conference. I don't know, can you see this me before we started to invest all of this and this is me nowadays. It's not not difficult anymore or not as difficult anymore. So I've I've learned a lot in this process. So what did the organization invest? We invested a lot of time. We did this really thoroughly. We learned everything we had to we needed to learn. It was a lot on technical skills on how to lead innovation processes on so on. So a lot of time was spent. We had to invest in web cameras and headsets. But of course, almost everyone already has this. So it's not a big investment. We had to create the right team because as I mentioned earlier, no one can do this on their own. It's my strong opinion. You need different kind of expertise. So you have to build a team according what you already have in the organization. You have to you have to recruit new expertise that you lack. So this is what's very, very important. And my organization, the Higher Education Authority, we joined together with IT in higher education to be able to do this because we were lacking the technical skills and expertise and also the design expertise that these people have because they have been working with issues on educational developments for 10 years. For example, Alastair Begitter and Marcus that you have met and we'll meet later on. They are experts in designing students experiences and facilitate student learning. And the conference is not much different, but it's somehow you need these expertise to think how can I do it in a good way so people get not bored because it's very easy in an online conference to press the button, leave meeting. You don't even have to be ashamed by leaving the physical room as in a normal conference. So how that is a challenge. How can I keep you interested so you stay on? So we needed this kind of expertise. Then also we had as an organization, we invested in Zoom as a platform for doing this and it was a completely stable platform. We had more than 500 participants and it's Zoom could take them all. So it was stable and that is of course very, very important because otherwise you wouldn't want to join or participate the whole day because our participants also they joined us at nine o'clock and left us that I think it was four o'clock in the afternoon. So many people stayed the whole day so they wouldn't do that if it wasn't stable. And also you need a lot of courage to do this. It's scary sometimes for a project manager because you don't have the same amount of control that you normally have when you do a normal conference, a virtual conference needs teamwork in a different kind of way. You need enthusiasm that is really helpful and I don't know if you can say we invested in this but we found a lot of enthusiasm and also a lot of playfulness just experimenting and trying to have fun with this and saying, okay, if not everything is perfect, it will be all right in the end anyway. It's just a success to get through the day and invite people and have good conversations. So don't put the bar too high on you because you wouldn't be able to do it then. I'm sorry, I was going to... That was really the point of view of the authority but how did the participants experience this and what sort of feedback do we get and what do we learn from that? Yeah, we did an evaluation on the last minutes of the day on the first virtual conference day but also later the week after we did a real evaluation and I can show you some quotes of what people said and for me it was really... I was really really surprised. For example, I was surprised that more than 48 people wanted to join the conference. We were 500 and I was surprised by the comments and how positive people were. So I show you just some of the positive feedback that we got but most of it looks like this. It's not me writing this, it's our participants. So this is about accessibility but also about being social and networking that most people don't think you are able to do in an online conference but our participants say that it was better than a real conference or physical conference in real life. They suddenly could meet people they would never have met before and also this quote about planning because a well-oiled conference that is problem-free needs a lot of planning, meticulous planning. But it was fun to hear that it feels like a taste of the future and I think we can all agree the future is here now. And this statement too about networking. I think this also shows you this aspect of democratization of conference, participation in conference. We can facilitate networking amongst people that would otherwise never meet because they have to travel because of expenses. You know all of this and I think this is really an important point because different new voices can speak and can be heard and can come with input. I find this is really, really interesting and important. I also want to show you some more negative critical points quotes and they are like this and not enough time to many choices. So too much to do too much in the program. Everything seemed to be interesting. So something about connection on mobile connections are not stable. Yeah, and then nothing negative to say. So this was actually, this is quotes from the real evaluation. So and they were almost all positive. I've never experienced this in anything I've done in my work experience. Never this kind of positiveness. So what are the conclusions for me as working in a government agency? I let you read this on your own, but I will also speak at the main same time. So we save some time. This quote you see we don't travel. We participate is a comment someone left in a chat. And I think that is really demonstrating a shift. It represents a shift in perspective from the participants, but also for me as a government agency that yes, we don't need to travel. It's more important to focus on participation and facilitating participation. It doesn't matter if it is in real life or if it is online, you can do it online. We have proven now that it works online as well or maybe even better. People said it was better than a real conference or real life conference. So it works on every level. It also meant that it was innovation and an operational development exercise for my organization. That is also very important. It created this way of working and having conference created added value. We created a community of practice and included ourselves as a government organization. That was really, really important. And later on the second virtual conference, we also implied a concept of large group intervention where all stakeholders are together in the same room, which would be very difficult to organize because of timetables and so on and could discuss the next step for educational development in Sweden. So everyone could discuss it at the same time. So this is added value and then also the point again that no one can do this on their own. You have to find partners for the idea for the content of the conference because a virtual conference cannot be with only 40 people. It's not enough. You need this momentum of 200, 400. So you need a critical mass and also you need expertise that you yourself lack. So you have to do it as a team. It's a team effort. And then also my personal experience and conviction is that working this way with online platforms for cooperation where I could cooperate with all of the stakeholders at all of the universities at the same time, it actually achieves better results. The outcome is better for me as a government agency because I can reach everyone and I can use an online platform as means for creating interaction and consensus. When many stakeholders need to cooperate, I could never do that. It would be very expensive and very difficult and time consuming in real life. So this is better for me. And also this is an opportunity for operational development for an organization because when you go into this, I showed you the before and after picture. I was quite analog. Let's face it. I'm not anymore. And even the organization has taken a big step forward in being much more digital and thinking about our way of our frame of mind and our way of working. Could we do it differently? How can we use digital means to get better results? Thanks, Andrea. A good overview there. And we've had quite a lot of comments in the chat. And if you could stop sharing your screen, we can go back to viewing maybe seeing Marcus and Brigitte. And I'd like to hear bring all three of you in to comment on some of the chat questions. Marcus and Brigitte, you've been quite involved in the chat. Any interesting points coming up before we move on? Am I still sharing the screen? Nope, you're fine. You're fine. Well, we tried to answer as much as the questions that come in because we're a bit not ahead in time, but behind time schedule. And there were all sorts of questions that were technical and organizational. One was about the roles that we designed for that or that we came up with while we were working on it. So, yes, there were a couple of roles and basically there was one host role that was dealt with from the ITHU side and that was like a presenters or a moderators role on the authority side. And then there were a couple of other roles. So we designed and said this is a chat moderator role and this is a breakout room manager role. And what more did we have there, Brigitte? Yes, we had the chat moderator and breakout manager. We had... I think there was a conference guide role as well. Yes, and we had the moderator, the overall moderator role. And we also had admin role, someone that could administrate the Zoom instance and make the correct configurations there. Maybe a couple of words then. This is maybe a bit of the background that needs to be known that in our country in Sweden, we have this kind of infrastructure that all the universities would have all their own instance of Zoom because it's provided by the Swedish NREN. And so we had this community of knowledgeable people around. And then most of the participants in the meetings, they were quite used to the platform and that was also making it a bit more easy. We had some questions in the chat about the number of people and how much, what our experience is, where is that? Okay, is that stable with 300, 400 people in the room? And yes, it is. As you see now, we're about 197, all with video and audio compared to our earlier platform that was Adobe Connect. We feel that this is something else and it really invites you to use video and audio in the meeting, but not so much of the other functionality that we had in Adobe Connect. I just wanted to say that a comment to what Andrea and Alice has been saying that I think one pretty success factor of the whole conference was the actual invitation that the authority sent out. And you invited everybody to the table and everybody that was listened to and that was part of the success because everybody was joining in, learning designers, pathological developers that came to the conference and then really felt this is a place where we can speak up and somebody is listening and taking care of the harvest of what we are saying and getting some results. So I think that was really, really the most successful part of the whole organization. Just one more word probably on the technical issues. At the moment, you know, it's probably the same around all Europe and we're quite lucky and fortunate here in Sweden because we just managed Zoom to get a private cloud for us in Stockholm with 100,000 concurrent users. And that's making everybody happy because all the online education in Sweden right now is supposed to be online, all the education, entire education institutes. So that's quite fantastic. Probably one more design thing that was just like a key question that we mentioned when we were instructing all the self-organizing teams. We came up with a template and we came up with a couple of questions. Here you go and all the people who are or all the parties who are part of the conference please address these kind of questions and we have that somewhere and it could be shared, I think. But one main question is just that when you have some expert or some invited speaker or anything, you ask him or her, okay, 400 people coming, what do you want to know from those people? And then they realize, yes, that's a good point. So the basic thing of having interactivity, having a dialogue as the main design principle, that was the point we wanted to get through to the presenters. Well, Alistair. Thoughts from Baguita, I'd like to hear really before we move on to a little bit of exercise where you get a chance to do some socialization. Yes. I would like to emphasize this perfect match that Andrea also we're talking about because in our network of IT and higher education in Sweden, we actually have been waiting a long time to find this perfect match and we certainly did when we found Andrea there at the physical conference. So it has been a really great opportunity to combine different sorts of competencies into successful work, I believe. And you need to dare to try out these things. Be playful, be creative, let things crash if needed, as long as you have your bosses with you and have a very coordinated team and rehearse in detail. And depending on digital literacy, start with smaller steps if you feel unsure and have a creative meeting with interactivity or host a smaller webinar with interactivity and start some place. But we need to challenge our present work processes, I believe. Yeah, so I mean really the key is that what we learned was that we could do a social conference. People actually, as Andrea showed, the feedback was this was very social. I admit this webinar, we haven't been so social yet. You've been chatting, that's great to see. There are loads of questions here. We've got 200 participants out there. We're going to try and give you a chance to talk to each other just to give you that sort of experience of what we are doing. But we can't give you the full conference experience. It takes longer time, but we're going to try that. And one of the strengths of Zoom we think is the ability to do breakout groups in large numbers. It was possible and it will be connected, but it often didn't work. So fingers crossed, hold thumbs, whatever you do in your culture. Over to Marcus. Yes, and I thought we just... I share my screen and I show you how is it done because that's the question that I often get. So let me just see to get this right. And probably what we should do before we do this then you should share a link, Alistair. Or if it's Biggie died, I can't remember. I'm sorry, too many conferences. And that's a link for the harvest, whatever you say. And if you want to share it with each other and with us we'll give you a link to another mentee. And we're using mentee right now because we found during these days that paddlers were a bit overloaded so we didn't get through to paddler all the time that didn't seem reliable whereas mentee still seems to work. Okay, I'm now going to share my screen. So, and here you see my computer screen. And yes, we are about 200 people in the room and there is a restriction to Zoom. It is said that up to 200 people can be at breakout rooms and it's about 50 breakout rooms. So let's do that. As a host in the meeting I've got this breakout room functionality there. It's here and it helps me to count and here I just put in something like 50 or so because that's the maximum amount that I know. And then it helps me divide. So I see if I choose 50 there will be three to four participants per room. And I'm very brave now and I push the button. Here we are. This is a random assignment of all you almost 200 guys into small breakout rooms. And I think this was the main design and interaction element that really not many people had experienced before and it was also a very big success factor in the whole meeting. So let's say that this is going to work. Here is an option where you can decide if you want to move all you guys into the breakout rooms without having the opportunity to do something else. And I will choose to move you all there. And there is this question if you want to allow participants to return to the main session at any time or not. If you choose it like that then there will be a leave breakout room functionality that gets you back to the main session where we are sitting here. And if I would have it like this then you would have to stay and then you risk that if you leave that you will leave the whole meeting. So I leave it open to you and I will hope that you have a good discussion for around 10 minutes or something and please make contact, talk to whatever you've been experiencing, what your plans are, what your feelings are, what you've experienced, whatever. And now I will open the breakout rooms and hopefully you will see each other some new acquaintances. Bye-bye.