Last couple of days has been a unique experience for me. I have been asked to co-ordinate a workshop. The workshop is being conducted by IIT-Bombay and is streamed to 100+ centres, there are around 9,000 faculty members attending it remotely. Technology is amazing isn't it. There have been a few glitches along the way some frustrating, some amusing. I wish to share it with you. In the remote chance of any of the attendee reading this, it is a figment of imagination, any resemblance to any person dead or alive is purely coincidental.
As long as the speaker is speaking everything is fine, participants listen (or sleep), do whatever they want to do. It is when the speaker wants to make it interactive the fun starts. There are centres with quality equipment and there are no issues there. It is with centres with lesser bandwidth that things go all wrong. The remote centre starts with hello, hello, hello; can you hear me......Result waste of time. Then there is the issue of time lag. The remote centre waits for answer and thinking the speaker didn't hear them starts repeating the question. At the same time speaker starts with the reply. So the result we get to hear question-and-answer simultaneously. Or the remote centre does not switch their mic off, resulting in an echo of the speaker's answer.
Now coming to the title of this blog, I will relate my experiences here with our participants. They are faculty members. Handling them is more difficult than handling students. We need to conduct some activity sessions, interact with them and try to get their opinion on the sessions being conducted and the topics being covered. They all want to speak, no compromises there. And most of the times, they go on parallel tracks. We discuss politics, how it is ruining their chances of research. One person starts on it and another starts off with some other aspect totally unrelated. I had lots of trouble trying to get the discussion back on track, without offending them. I couldn't yell, shut up and listen to me!!!!!!! It is fun, a new experience and at times frustrating, too.
Amazing development of technology! And your experiences are amusing! It is always said that teachers are the worst students. Go on sharing.
ReplyDeleteThe two incidents remind me of two different scenarios. First one is typical of most conference calls where either everyone is speaking at the same time or each is waiting for the other to respond.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine how difficult it is to handle a crowd of teachers. I faced a similar situation 10 years ago when I designed and co-ordinated a training program for senior members of the organization. Though this was a live one and not remote (thankfully), it was very challenging because the audience for the program had an average age of 45 and the faculty consisted of Vice Presidents or Heads of various business lines. I had to tactfully manage the egos of the faculty while getting them to start/complete their sessions as per the schedule and get the participants to return to the auditorium after breakfast/lunch/tea-time. It was a very interesting experience where I learnt a lot in terms of handling people.