News Story

The interactive webconference: Student Connections

Peter Scott, Tuesday 29 Jul 2014

KMi hosted the first Student Connections conference this week. The online event from The Open University’s Faculty of Social Sciences took place between 30 June 2014 – 4 July 2014 and presented a series of highly interactive webcasts to Open University students from all the Faculty.

Hosting a week of live and "as live" events, from a multitude of live studio spaces created in the Knowledge Media Institute, the conference drew together staff and student presentations, keynotes, and the innovative Social Science ‘podmag’.

For Social Science researchers this was both an opportunity to showcase their world leading projects to their student body… but more, to do this ‘at scale’ in a highly interactive two way conversation; and ‘all at once’.

For KMi, this was a chance to explore large scale interactive webcasting. Whilst we have created webcast models for hundreds of live users, with highly interactive elements such as voting, quizzes, themed text chat etc since 2005; this was a chance to seriously text new ‘cloud’ video streaming technology, and a new toolkit for interactive web widgets at real, live scale.

The event was very successful… and a number of innovations from the experiement are now in scope!