Higher Ed Experts Update: YouTube Webinar — the good, the bad and the ugly

It’s been about 2 hours since the first inaugural webinar of Higher Ed Experts ended.

As I said to the attendees at the beginning of the webinar, this free session was also a “stress test” for the web conferencing application… and it succeeded in pushing my stress level to the roof.

The whole webinar experience wasn’t as good as planned (poor would probably be a better term) and I want to apologize to both presenters and the attendees for providing such a bad experience.

Four different issues have been identified:

• The first presentation was done using HTML slides hosted on a server that wasn’t able to support so many requests at the same time. That’s why many attendees got the following message instead of the presentation slides:
  “The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems”
  This issue won’t happen again as all future presentations will be made using the PowerPoint slides, an identical process to today’s second presentation.
• Some participants encountered big gaps in the audio and got kicked out from the webinar room (I did a couple of times). While some of the lagging wasn’t perceived at the conferencing server level, it seems that the application used for this webinar wasn’t able to provide a good user-experience.
  I’m currently switching to my plan B listing other applications including the big (and very expensive) name in the web conferencing business, WebEx. I’ll have retainI have retained WebEX and will test this new provider by early next week and tested a new provider by early next week. As I said above, today’s webinar was a stress test (which is why I didn’t charge for it – thanks, God!). For the paying webinar series, I thought it was worth trying to spend less on the conferencing application and more on the speakers’ compensation while keeping the registration fee very low and avoiding soliciting vendor sponsorship. I was wrong.
• Some participants found I was difficult to understand due to a poor microphone and my thick accent ;-) I chose to stay away from a headset to move freely from one computer to the other. This choice was another bad decision. I’ll stick to the headset for the future webinars and try to reduce my speaking time to a minimum. The future sessions will have single presenter so there won’t be any need for me to talk besides my 2-minute intro.
• Some participants couldn’t log in. I got a lot of requests yesterday and today from members who thought they had register for the webinar and didn’t. I spent a lot of time trying to have them added to the list this morning at the last minute. I won’t do this again.

I’ll be updating I’ve updated all the HEE registered members and especially the ones who have already registered for the other webinar series on the next steps via email by Tuesdaytonight and announced I’m switching to WebEx, the leader of the web conferencing market, but I wanted to share these issues and my plan to fix them with everybody so you can hear it from the source.

If you have questions or concerns about HEE, please email me at karine@higheredexperts.com