The first Online Open House for graduate programmes and minor subjects went well, but there is room for improvement
The purpose of the Open House for Master's degree programmes and minor subjects is to equip our bachelor students well to make choices regarding their minor subjects and Master's degree programmes.
It is especially our bachelor students who participate, but students from other universities in Denmark and abroad is also invited. This year, the event took place online on 10 February.
Student Consellor at the Faculty of Science, Simone Nothlev Sørensen, is the project manager for the faculty's participation in the event, and she has had a busy time planning the first Online Open House:
– We decided at SDU in September 2020 that the event should take place online. Normally, the faculties and SDU Student Services have a lot of coordinating meetings leading up to the Open House. But with a digital event of this size that we had no experience in, we had many new things to consider. There were periods with many unresolved questions, but I think that the process up to 10 February all went well, Simone Nothlev Sørensen says.
SDU had chosen the agency Hello Monday to develop the online event platform that the participants were invited to use. Here, the presentations could be searched for and accessed via Zoom webinars, so there were several technical features that should work on the day:
– In the Student Counselling at Science, we were excited about whether the technique would work or whether everything would crash, says Simone Nothlev Sørensen.
– Fortunately it worked, and the presentation from the Student Counselling went well. We had 160 visitors to our presentation and approximately 80 visitors to our drop-in-meeting during the day and we generally experienced a really nice atmosphere. At an ordinary Open House, there is often a lot of noise and we answer the same questions over and over again. At the online event we avoided this because all participants could hear each other's questions and our answers. I also think we received a lot of good questions via chat along the way. We also took advantage of the fact that we could put links to the website in the chat and supplement each other's answers to the students' questions.
After the event Simone Nothlev Sørensen have asked the presenters from the Faculty of Science for an evaluation of their experience with the online event. The preliminary answers show that many of them have had a successful experience with both the technologies used and the number of participants.
But some of them have not had as many participants as desired and others think that the Zoom webinars gave a feeling of one-way communication, as the hosts could not see the participants. In addition, some people experienced technical difficulties with Zoom. There have also been challenges with subsequently putting some of the recorded presentations into the event platform, so that they can be accessed by students who did not participate in the event.
For the faculties as a whole, 136 webinars were held with a total of 4160 participants and 89 meetings with 2253 participants. The figures include presenters and participants who may have attended several events. In total, there have been 6413 interactions to the event. The preliminary responses from the evaluation among participants show that 98 % answer that they had a positive experience, and 70 % state that they have become more clarified in relation to their choice.
According to Simone Nothlev Sørensen, there is room for improvement when the Open House for potential new bachelor students that is to be held on 26-27 February, which she also believes is to be expected. At the same time, it means that good experiences have been gained in having had a kind of rehearsal - on the day of the event.