(Reprinted with permission)

The following was posted to the IUC96-L Online Conference to explain the workings of the Conference. The Conference ran for three weeks in April, 1996, covered three aspects of "Course Development for the World Wide Web" with with two expert "Discussants" each week and over 800 participants.

The ups and downs of running a Listserv-based computer conference.

Eugene Rubin, Associate Vice President, Instructional Development,
University of Maryland, University College.

(Annotations by mauri collins, conference manager and moderator)

This message contains the following sections:

• INTRO....
• A LITTLE HISTORY....
• BEST LAID PLANS....
• THE MODERATOR
• SOFTWARE AND ACCESS
• COSTS
• NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS
• PARTICIPANT RESPONSE
• OTHER MODELS

INTRODUCTION

I thought it would be appropriate to share with all of you the ins and outs of organizing and administering this conference. It certainly relates to this week's topic and will give you an idea of the logistics that you might have to face in setting up some sort of interactivity for your courses. The issues are the same whether you are using conferencing on the WEB (such as Hypermail or Hypernews), proprietary conferencing software (such as First Class or Forum), or using a listserv. There are logistical issues (how to set it up , how people interact with it, etc.), policy issues (should it be moderated, should it have restricted access, what are the responsibilities of the instructor/moderator, etc.), and management issues (What is the optimum number of participants, how does one keep participants "on-topic" (if that's deemed necessary), etc.).... and these areas barely touch all of the issues.

A LITTLE HISTORY....

The International University Consortium is a consortium of 50 institutions worldwide that share in the development and use of distance education materials. The consortium also has as its mission to provide professional development opportunities for its members (and their faculty and staff). We therefore run an annual workshop/conference on-site at College Park, Maryland, which covers relevant issues in distance education and technology. Last year we decided to run a computer conference (by listserv) to support the on-site session on "Computer Conferencing", and we opened it up to anyone who wanted to participate (for a fee, of course!). The fee is not a trivial issue, as there are real costs associated with running the listserv, which I will discuss below. Last year the listserv conference ran 3 weeks and attracted 300 people from 17 countries. It resulted in over 125 pages of single spaced text and several complaints that the traffic was too much to handle .... we did not have a DIGEST option so each comment resulted in a separate message in everybody's e-mailbox.

BEST LAID PLANS

This year we were determined to avoid the incredibly heavy burden of hand-enrolling each participant (that is, putting each participant's e-mail address in by hand.) Last year we did this to ensure that anyone who was in the conference had also paid. However, when you enter e-mail addresses by hand, entry errors result and you will even find that some people do not know their own e-mail addresses. We also had difficulty reading registrant's handwriting (a 1 often looks like an l and a 0 often looks like an O), and some people simply never gave us an e-mail address. And you would be surprised how often various participant's computers are down! Therefore, this year we were going to let participants subscribe themselves (as one would do in a normal listserv.)

So much for the best laid plans..... the overwhelming response and some balky registration software put us behind schedule and we ended up doing this all again... but this time with over double the number of participants (now over 800). You simply can't imagine what has gone on here over the past week in trying to resolve various e-mail rejections, calling up registrants to correct e-mail addresses, trying to reconcile our registration software list with the Listserv subscription list, etc. (My apologies to those who got started late.... it wasn't always our fault!) Mauri spent quite a few late nights getting people on and Geralyn Brostrom did the lion's share of the work at our end. The idea of self-subscribing is still the solution, but requires a lot of lead time. If any one knows of good conference/event registration software, please let me know.... it will help our process considerably.

THE MODERATOR

Last year we had a moderator, who sent out electronic readings (for which we cleared copyright) and guided the discussion. This year we decided to bring in a bunch of "experts" because the topic (Web development) was still in its infancy and we felt that we could all learn from each other. We paid our moderator and we offered honorariums for the "experts." Those of you on the DEOS-L and WWWDEV listservs might remember a "Call for proposals" soliciting the experts. This has worked out well, and I think that this has resulted in maintaining the level and relevance of the content.

The conference moderator is absolutely crucial to the process. The position requires a person who is an experienced jack-of-all-trades in listserv or online conference moderation and maintenance, someone who has a handle on the content/topics of the conference; a person who can do without a lot of sleep, (mauri: who can work with a virtual team of people they have never met, if moderation is done at a distance, and who works cheerfully under pressure.)

SOFTWARE AND ACCESS

Last year, we use a freeware version of "LISTSERV," but as I said, it didn't DIGEST. This year we are using "LISTPROC", which does DIGEST... but is clumsy at doing other things. Mauri can probably give people an idea of various List handling software. [mauri: Unless your technical support person thinks problem-solving and writing scripts is as much fun as Peter Friedman does, and is willing to work all hours of the day and night, I would NOT suggest moderator and techie learn the conference software together under REAL pressure]

We chose the listserv way of doing the conference (instead of using the web and some conferencing software such as hypermail or hypernews or even some of the commercial stuff) because we wanted to provide access for as many as possible. Many did not have constant access to the web, but all had e-mail. Even listserver software has its problems: It is slow in dealing with interactivity and are unable to thread conversations. One plus is that participants only have to deal with their own mail programs on their home systems, and don't have to telnet anywhere else and log into a "foreign" system and learn a whole new set of conferencing commands. Even so... there has been LOTS of action. So far, in 10 days we have generated about 185 pages of printed text. The DIGEST is set to send out a message containing various participant inputs every 4 hours or every 500 lines, whichever comes first.

Next year we are considering offering it over the WEB, restricting it by password. We know that this will bar some people, but it will likely solve a lot of our difficulties. It may be possible to run it both on the Web and by listserv, but that will require an interface between the two. If anyone knows how to build an interface between something like hypermail and a listserv, please let me know (oops, that's "technical" stuff..... next week's topic.) [mauri: yes, gene...you run the conference via listserv and subscribe your hypermail program...it will receive all the posts and work its magic...as was described, I believe, in a recent digest....] I would also be interested to know how many of you do NOT have regular access the the WWW. [mauri: send that information directly to erubin@nova.umuc.edu :-) :-)]

COSTS

There are lots of person hours involved in this effort as well as real costs. It also takes a lot of labor to process the payments within a university setting. Those of you who are considering this might want to check with your finance department first. Ours is groaning. They have suggested only allowing payments by cash, checks or credit card in the future; invoices for $25 are likely not worth the effort. Deciding on an appropriate price for such an event is an interesting issue. If we actually tried to cover our real costs, we might charge considerably more. What the market will bear is untested. Views?

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS

We received an overwhelming response to our brochure as well as announcements over listservs, and our web pages. I think the phenomenal response was because we had a "hot" topic...... everyone is interested in web development. Other topics might not be as strong a draw. We seriously discussed cutting off the enrollments and returning people's money but decided that we could handle it and that the traffic was controllable (so far, so good). Next year we will have a definite policy and cut-off and strongly encourage people to find out if it is full before sending money. This will not completely solve the problems and we need to think it all through. Interesting problem.... any thoughts? [mauri: it is my experience that in any discussion group less than 20 percent of the participants actually post, and less than 10 percent post more than once...when in a voluntary situation with no grade attached to participation]

PARTICIPANT RESPONSE

We had a lot of positive feedback last year.... and already have had some this year. It is not the ideal medium for interaction, but it does connect people. There is some difficulty in making participants understand in advance the volume of material that will be presented to them, and how they can manage that volume. People who attend a conference/workshop devote 2 or 3 or more days to that activity. But when you are at your desk, you are usually not prepared to put that kind of time in. Are your experiences the same? How would you suggest we deal with this issue? Shorten the conference? Restrict the number of participants? Leave it the same?

OTHER MODELS

Some of you might remember the "Roadmap" workshop offered by e-mail which taught internet navigation skills. This was a one way process, where "lessons" were sent out at regular intervals. A nice initiative which enrolled hundreds of thousands. There was no interactivity, but the material was very instructive and there were exercises to allow one to practice. There are standard listservs (such as DEOS-L and WWWDEV, which are probably relevant to this group), where the discussion is less directed, and perhaps less focused and organized..... but free! There are newsgroups, which often are a bit wilder and scattered, but serve a good purpose and a definite clientele. There are conferencing systems available for the WWW (e.g. hypernews.... and a variety of commercial products) and there are realtime interactive environments (Chat, MOO's, MUD's, etc.) which bring an entirely different dimension to the interaction and require a different set of skills for the instructor. All can be used to achieve interaction goals on the WWW or over the internet. Which one to use? Which does what best? What are the technical and administrative issues for each? ..... what a great Web page! Is anyone ambitious?

Comments to: Gene Rubin

Eugene Rubin