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.
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:
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.
(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.
Date
Number of new sign-up
2023-03-01
2
2023-03-02
5
2023-03-06
1
2023-03-16
1
2023-03-23
3
2023-04-04
1
2023-04-06
1
2023-04-07
1
2023-04-08
1
2023-04-21
1
2023-06-22
2
Total
19
Course Analytics
Number of Modules (resources and activities): 45
Visits: 2167
Total Time Spent: 14:24:22
Most used Browsers: Chrome (97.26%)
Most used system: Windows 10 (96.32%)
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.
