Virtual Meetings: Is it a fad or is it your future?

Academic life is nothing if not meetings--"hallway" conversation with co-workers, committee meetings, one-on-one meeting with students, and even our core responsibility of teaching is a form of meeting. Not long ago our PT faculty read the book Death by Meeting, and since that time I have tried to be creative and more disciplined in how I think about meetings. I try to make each meeting I'm involved in to be as efficient & effective as possible.

This commitment has lead to the use of virtual meetings as a viable solution to improving meetings I have. Due to improvements in technology and other factors have made it easier than ever to incorporate virtual meetings (here is a primer on vitual meetings from the people at Educause.edu) into the meeting options. Here is just a short list of recent virtual meetings I have had:

• Conversation with work team on incorporating changes to our website (using Skype to connect 4 people not on campus).
  
• New student orientation and advising to 10+ students in an online program using Adobe Connect so that they could view a prepared Powerpoint presentation and then have a Q & A session between the whole group.
• Discuss upcoming teaching responsibility with two faculty living in New Zealand and Australia using Adobe Connect so that they could see my screen as I oriented them to course changes.
• Revise a research paper in real-time with co-authors, while simulataneously sharing resource files using Skype
  
• An impromtu Skype phone call, with webcams, with my 5th grader who wanted to show me an award from school.

Certainly, the good old telephone could have been used for these meetings (althought I would have hated to be the one to pay for that 40 min long distance call to New Zealand & Australia on a landline!), and that is still a great way to communicate. However, the ability to collaborate on documents or for a group to hear AND see the same content-rich information is exactly what is needed in some meetings in order to achieve the meeting goals.

Over the next few blog postings some of the faculty and staff in the RHCH will be sharing examples and how-to's for several virtual meeting and collabortion options, including educational and productivity uses for Skype, Adobe Connect, and others. In addition, the Education Technology Committee will host a virtual session using Adobe Connect to teach you how you could incoporate virtual meetings.

Please send me an email or use the comments to ask questions or suggest specific things you would like to see covered on this topic.

I look forward to "seeing" you in the virtual world.

Tim