Zoom for Societies

Richmond's live walk in Tokyo earlier this month was great but it suffered from audio problems at their end in the beginning and the speaker spoke too fast. We've learnt from that. Our next live walk will be in Kyoto on 30th March to see the historic (quaint) city and the famous cherry blossom. Email richmond@theartssociety.org if you'd like to join us.

Hello Richard, it was included in part one of the Zoom guidance which was issued in June. We are strongly advising that lectures are not recorded. If you need further info please don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

Where please do I find The Arts Society's advice on recording Zoom lectures?

When I'm talking to societies about Zoom Webinars I always give the following advice.

1.  You must set up a Practice Session for the 20-30 minutes before each lecture.  You enable it by ticking the Practice Session box on the webinar scheduling page. 2.  In the Practice Session you must check that the lecturer can share his/her screen.  If she can’t, you must make her a co-host by going to Participants, clicking on the lecturer's name and then clicking on the blue word More that appears. 3.  You must send the lecturer and the other panelists the special panelists' invitation, not the one that goes to the attendees. You do that by clicking on the blue Invitations link at the bottom of the webinar scheduling page and clicking on the word Edit on the right. 

If you get through those three hoops, everything will go fine.

Hello all,

Regarding fees paid to lecturers - there is no suggested rate as all of our accredited lecturers are freelance and set their own fee levels. This applies to attending test meetings as well as for delivering lectures and study days, whether online or 'in person'. Each booking between an autonomous Society and a freelance lecturer is negotiated separately.

Lecturers have supplied information about their fee levels and this is available for programme secretaries and study day organisers to view in the password-protected online Directory along with any individual cancellation terms the lecturer might suggest.

I hope this is helpful.

How much do you suggest we pay lecturers to attend test meetings? £50? £75?

The most frequent questions I'm asked nowadays are about whether to use Meetings or Webinars, how to get people automatically onto the top table in Webinars, how to set up polls and how to stream to YouTube. If you have any questions, email me at richmond@theartssociety.org and please include your phone number.

A huge thank you to Jo Little for his excellent and utterly understandable briefings on using Zoom which I have just watched. It could not have been clearer and I now look forward to the rest of the series starting next week. A* work Jo!

   Hello, thank you for kicking off the conversation regarding the use of Zoom. One way around this is to use YouTube to broadcast the lecture, meaning you can bypass the need for Members using Zoom. Some Societies have already done this successfully - perhaps they might comment below to share how they went about this? We will also include details in our guidance in June. As Richard says, it is a widely used platform (one of many) so there will be public scrutiny of what has become a vital communication tool - which is not a bad thing. Of course we always have to be mindful to protect personal data in using any communication platform: again, we will give more guidance on that.

My son, who works as a consultant in cyber-security, has warned me not to use Zoom at all. The security aspects concerning personal data are apparently seriously worrying. Have you considered this for individual members?

The idea of online lectures is obviously a good one but there are concerns.

Maggie Clive-Matthews

Eastbourne