Advice for museum staff planning to videoconference

Planning your session

Your videoconference session may well be an adaptation of one that you do with a ‘live’ audience or it may be something created exclusively for videoconferencing. Whatever the case, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration when planning a videoconferencing session – many of which also apply to a ‘live’ session, but many of which are specific to videoconferencing.

• Adapting a session for videoconferencing.

• Make it manageable. Whereas a ‘live’ session at the museum may well be an hour or more long, a videoconference needs to be a lot shorter – between 20 and 45 minutes, depending on the audience, their age and the nature of the subject matter.

• Remember, you don’t have to be on line continuously. You can arrange with the teacher to do a starter session, then go offline and come back to give some more input, answer questions or whatever.

• At any point, be it planned or spontaneous, either you or the teacher can suggest that you take time-out to discuss something, formulate some questions, do some research or do whatever you would do in a normal lesson.

• Because it is a videoconference does NOT mean the presentation has to be continuous or that you have to videoconference for the whole lesson.

• Make the session interactive –a videoconference is a live, real-time event and the most powerful aspect of the technology is that it enables your audience to interact with you and vice versa – so you need to come up with a variety of strategies that require your audience to respond in some way – be it think, discuss, vote, ask questions and whatever other ideas you can come up with.

• Top tips The RAMM team were asked how they would advise another museum setting out on the videoconferencing route. Their advice included having one person taking the lead, one person operating the equipment, patience, perseverance, planning, practice and, crucially, making sure you have the breadth and depth of knowledge to run a confident session.

Advance planning with the school

• Contact the school well in advance of the videoconference.

• Send them materials that will help with their preparation.

• Discuss the presentation style of the session with the teacher and plan how best you can work together. Teachers may want to pause the session at various times so that they can work with the children on questions that have arisen. They may want to ask the presenters to amplify certain points or to pursue a point that has arisen.

Practical Preparation: the room

Choosing a space to use and preparing it for videoconferencing.

• If possible, use a space where you can leave the videoconferencing equipment and ‘set’ set-up so you don’t have to clear it away after each conference.

• Set up your space so that it looks good on camera . You might choose a plain backdrop (blue is a good colour for videoconferencing) on which you might just put the museum logo and nothing else, so the characters will stand out OR, if you have the space, you might create a ‘set’ with artefacts, pictures, costumes etc relevant to your subject.

PICTURE OF ‘MUSEUM SET’ HERE

• Judicious use of screens and sheets can block from view anything you don’t want the audience to see. Screens are also useful to create somewhere for participants to ‘hide’ off screen if needed.

• If your videoconference room is in a space in the museum that is open to visitors, put signs up around the space telling visitors that a conference is in progress and that their quietness would be much appreciated!

Connectivity and videoconferencing equipment

Videoconferencing can be done using Broadband or ISDN. Broadband is the way of the future as all schools in the UK have broadband connectivity and calls are free. The more bandwidth you use for videoconferencing the better the quality of picture and audio.

Exeter Museum have been using an ADSL line with 256kb/s upstream, which means that they conferenced at 192kb/s. Without going into too much technical detail, the quality of this link was adequate but not perfect. The low bandwidth that RAMM were using combined with other factors at the school end which might have affected the quality, meant that the picture froze occasionally and sometimes the picture was unclear and broke up

The quality of videoconferencing equipment is improving all the time and so is the effectiveness of videoconferencing over broadband. The advice is:

• to go for as much bandwidth as possible (NB with an ADSL line the upstream bandwidth is the crucial part. Ideally you need a minimum of 521kb/s)

• Work closely with your local LA and RBC to make sure you are getting the best quality from your connectivity as possible. Sometimes adjustments to existing networks can make a great deal of difference to the quality of the videoconference picture and audio

RAMM have just received additional grant aid from Becta and Museums Libraries and Archives (MLA) to help upgrade their broadband!

• Make one person responsible for operating the equipment. This frees up the others to concentrate on the activities.

• There are all sorts of tips and advice for using videoconferencing equipment that you can take advantage of. A good place to start is the publication “Videoconferencing in the Classroom” which you can download from www.dmec.org.uk/videoconf