Center for IT-based Education

[Report] CITE-TUT Online International Seminar Series

22/5/2023

Jingjing Lin

Between March 2, 2023 and June 22, 2023, the “CITE-TUT Online International Seminar Series” (CITE-TUT オンライン 国際セミナーシリーズ) features ten guest speakers to give online talks on the topic of entrepreneurship. The Center for IT-based Education (CITE), in conjunction with the Research Administration Center (RAC), has organized ten events. This column aims to summarize and reflect on these events.

Hosting Platform

CITE’s experimental Learning Management System (LMS), which can be accessed at https://lms.cite.tut.ac.jp, serves as the primary platform for hosting the ten events. The platform’s BigBlueButton video meeting feature and Google Meet feature enabled us to conduct synchronous video meetings.

Course Creation

All ten events are listed as topics within a dedicated course titled ‘CITE-TUT Online International Seminar Series‘ on the LMS.

For each upcoming event, its dedicated topic page lists the introduction of the guest speaker, the Each upcoming event has its own dedicated topic page, which includes the guest speaker’s introduction, meeting room details, event poster, a link to add the event to your calendar (generated from Google Calendar), and a link to the guest speaker’s affiliation.

After each event concludes, the Google Calendar link is removed, and a new page is added to share the event recording and photos.

Public Access

To increase access and reduce the difficulty of participating in these events, all of them are free and open to anyone with an internet connection on their device.

Promotion Channels

Prior to each event, an event page is created on the CITE website and published on the Events page.

On the morning of each event, a ‘CITE 速報’ email is sent to all university members, providing them with the necessary details to take action and participate.

A promotional post, which quotes content from the event page and the ‘CITE 速報’ email, is then shared across the following channels to attract more attention:

Participants

A total of 119 participation counts were recorded. However, as most participants attended as guests without logging in, when using BigBlueButton meetings, it is not possible to determine if there were repeat attendees across these events.

SeminarDate and timeGuest speakerParticipantsRecording
1March 2, 15:00-16:00Adam Brimo19Click
2March 16, 15:00 – 16:00赤城 賀奈子33Click
3Pre-recorded video onlySaman KamranClick
4April 6, 15:00 – 16:00藤井 琢也14Click
5April 13, 15:00 – 16:00前川 啓一郎13Click
6May 11, 15:00 – 16:00Jing Lu, Ruby10Click
7May 25, 15:00–16:00勝間 亮5Click
8June 8, 15:00–16:00増尾 仁美9Click
9June 15, 15:00–16:00金丸 良4Click
10June 22, 15:00–16:00伊達山 泉10Click
TOTAL119
(Note: The recording pages are only accessible by TUT members. Please login to the LMS using your TUT account first.)

New Signups on the LMS

The six events have attracted a total of 19 new users who signed up on the LMS platform.

DateNumber of new sign-up
2023-03-012
2023-03-025
2023-03-061
2023-03-161
2023-03-233
2023-04-041
2023-04-061
2023-04-071
2023-04-081
2023-04-211
2023-06-222
Total19

Course Analytics

Event Photos

Reflection

These events provide excellent opportunities for TUT members to gain a better understanding of entrepreneurship both as a topic and a practice. The public access feature enables participants to attend events without logging in, promoting knowledge sharing. However, this also makes it difficult to gather usable data for analytical purposes. Additionally, no surveys have been developed to collect feedback from participants regarding their experience of participating. Therefore, it is challenging to understand how to improve in the future with regards to event management and topic choices.

The placement of BigBlueButton was made possible through collaboration with the Bluesky project. However, a server error occurred, which prevented the system from generating MP4 format recordings of the events. Consequently, starting from the fourth event, only Presentation playback format recordings were available, and uploading MP4 videos to the YouTube channel became impossible. As a result, manual video editing was required to produce MP4 videos. To address this issue, we switched to Google Meet starting from the seventh event.

The first time when we switched to Google Meet, the number of participants significantly dropped when compared to previous six events. One possible reason is that using Google Meet requires login of users, which removed the choice of anonymity for participants. Some users may prefer attending these online events without being noticed.

Overall, using an LMS to organize online seminars is an excellent approach to digitizing seminar and workshop offerings, making them more accessible to a broader audience. It also helps to diversify education opportunities offered at TUT by extending digitalization efforts to informal education, such as seminars and workshops.

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