A funny thing happened on the way to the AUSOM Mac User Group's Annual General Meeting: Public gatherings of more than two people were banned as a response to the Covid-19 crises. The group had been dabbling in using the Zoom video conferencing & collaboration app to save a frail but mentally alert country member from the rigours of travel to & from the Genealogy Special Interest Group she was conducting.
With the shutdown of public meeting venues we (I was a member of the organising committee at the time) decided to investigate Zoom in far greater detail, doing a trial run with another committee member's Zoom business account to run a meeting online instead of the monthly April meeting that we'd cancelled.
This was deemed moderately successful but more members needed to come along electronically, so we bought our own Zoom Pro account and ran with that. The physical meetings we used to hold at the main monthly venue used three classrooms with a new Special Interest Group starting every hour and running for 50 minutes with a break of 10 minutes between hourly SIGs.
With Zoom you can set up Breakout Rooms and allocate members to those rooms from the main meeting area, which we designated the Reception. This was "manned" by whoever was the designated meeting host.
When a 50-minute session ended, the participant dropped back into the Reception meeting, to be reallocated another session unless they wished to stay in the Reception or leave altogether. Membership numbers were down on what was possible & it was very apparent that we were all feeling our way through the various aspects of using Zoom.
That's when we set up Zoom training sessions on Mondays & Thursdays at 3pm & 8pm, with each session nominally running for an hour. Breakout rooms were used, depending on the hardware each member used to participate. Most were using computers but some had iPads. The user experience is significantly different between a Mac computer & a mobile device. It's best if a trainer uses similar hardware to the others in each Breakout room.
Those training sessions were attended by 86 individuals, representing 25% of the Group's membership base. A similar number attended the business session of the AGM on May 2, with 91 members & 3 guests involved throughout the day.
This is still not good enough, though. With Breakout rooms only the meeting host can move participants into a Breakout room. However, co-hosts (each Breakout room trainer was made a co-host) can freely travel between any of the Breakout rooms as they desire.
It actually makes sense for each participant to be made a co-host thus enabling them to go from room to room at will. The host allocates a Breakout room at the start of proceedings as each (co-host) member arrives in the Reception meeting, then they are free to go into any of the other Breakout rooms when the current session ends, thus reducing the enormous load the host would experience.
A problem with thirty or more people all milling around (so to speak) in the Breakout room allocation list is that list currently has no search feature, meaning finding the member's name can be tricky.
As the AGM over Zoom was declared a success, it was realised by the incoming committee that further training sessions were necessary to reach & teach members new to Zoom.
They have designated each Wednesday in May, at 3pm & 8pm to be Zoom training sessions. I missed one of the previous round of training sessions through general tiredness, but attended the other 15. I expect to be available for the eight sessions planned for May.
Written By peemee
2020-05-06T01:19:00Z