Providing online, real time drop-in surgeries for staff and students: google hangouts

The Elevate Team offer a number of support routes including Drop-in Surgeries in various buildings, at various times for various audiences (staff and students). This have various levels of success :-)

We are aware this approach has a number of limitations, in particular, geography (excludes the learning network), and time (not very flexible). Therefore, we will be piloting the use of Google Hangouts to offer an online, real time, surgery for both staff and students to ask questions around support and development of technology enhanced learning.

The aims are

1. to provide a regular, online surgery for all staff and students across UCS
2. further develop are knowledge around effective uses of Google Hangouts (web conferencing) to transfer to course teams and curriculum design
3. explore if this service could be offered within core support hours (9.00 to 17.00)

In the initial period the "office hour" will be every Thursday, 14.00 to 15.00. We'll be distributing a short url to our Google Hangouts event page. We'll be using the on air facility to enable the session to be recorded and the use of Q&A feature. The recording will to allow us to slice up the session as video guides, and auto archive to our YouTube channel.

The use of Hangouts on Air will mean it is more open (a good thing), however, it will mean we'll not address certain questions which will lead to potential data protection issues. Those areas will be dealt with off line.

Participation can be through two routes:

1. view only - you will need to simply go to the URL and watch
2. ask questions - you will need to access the event with a google account