Guidelines for organising online seminars

What is an online seminar?

Online seminars are an ideal way of bringing together new ideas and develop them further with your peers active in the field of networked learning. People interested in running a symposium at the 2010 conference are strongly encouraged to run an online seminar and use this opportunity to get more out of your symposium.

The seminar is an online event that runs prior to the networked learning conference on a topic of your choice related to the conference themes. This topic will be introduced and discussed from several perspectives with the audience. During this seminar key issues and questions will be discussed and paper submissions (for a symposium at the conference) will be further developed.

Purpose of the online seminar

The objective is to inform the audience about current research and interests. The aim here is to bring people together and further develop research and thinking and to prepare/finalise symposium papers.

The online seminar can be used as a ramp up to get to the heart of the matter and use each others contributions to focus the conference symposium. During the symposium presentation at the conference itself you have a chance to meet up and get more out of this event rather then simply presenting 3 to 4 papers followed by a question answer session.

Format

In the online seminars and hot seats space a forum will be made in which the chair should post the following items in the opening topic of their forum (click on ‘new topic’):

Introduction to the theme of the seminar topic
List of questions/issues that will be addressed

In the discussion space several discussion threads can be generated discussing the various perspectives related to the seminar topic. These can be introduced by each symposium co-presenter.

Please invite participants who join in to start a discussion thread themselves and become an active member of this group. This is a good way to build a group for a shared symposium submission and add new peers to your research group.

Chair and organisation

The chair will present an introduction to the main topic of the seminar and its broader context and relevance to the networked learning conference.
The chair of the seminar will bring together 2 or more discussants (co-presenters) who will lead a certain perspective on the seminar theme based on their own work/ research.
The chair will moderate and organise the online seminar discussions.
The chair is also responsible to bring the various discussion threads together and summarise the findings in relation to the theme of this seminar.

How to apply?

The chair will submit a short description of the online seminar topic and its relevance to the conference to the organising committee (m.f.delaat(ad)uu.nl). This description will also contain ideas on how to run the seminar interactively and the names of the co-presenters.

Include a short title for the name of your seminar and a two sentence description. These will be used by us to create and describe your forum in the online seminar space.