New Month, New Formats for Interactive Discussion = New Webinar

February 1, 2010 - 10:21 pm email to a friend

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Dr West

As we move from January to February, we’re planning for more than a transition of the GRACE faculty. Drs. Weiss and Harman were hugely helpful, and Dr. Pennell is coming back this month.

But beyond that, this month we’re going to pilot the move toward having some discussions of forum topics in a webinar format, rather than written responses immediately. We plan to transcribe these discussions quickly and then put the discussion up on the forum.

For now, we’ll see how this combination of some “mailbag” discussion on a webinar and some quick written answers on works. The topics that we designate for discussion in an upcoming webinar will have a response on the website saying something like, “This will be a good question for discussion in our upcoming webinar, on Tuesday, February 9th, at 8 PM EST. Those interested in participating in the live audience can click here for free registration. For those unable to attend the live program, the transcript of this discussion will be posted as soon as feasible after the program.”

This format will enable discussion of the more controversial, deeper, and more general interest topics to be with a couple of faculty experts. Importantly, we’re going to plan to have a wide range of experts from the lung cancer community participate in these webinar programs, so the GRACE audience will have the opportunity to hear from a more diverse group than ever before, because a huge fraction of my colleagues are inclined to help but can’t commit to a longitudinal role. By having the conversation move from the discussion forum to the webinar and then back to the discussion forum (after webinar discussions are transcribed), it will enable us to still have some more ongoing discussion and preserve the opportunity for members to write comments and provide insights to each other (and to the faculty). One downside is that most of the people participating won’t be continuing in an ongoing dialogue the way that our most valued faculty do, but I believe that Drs. Weiss, Pennell, and some of the other faculty will try to participate as much as feasible, on a longitudinal basis.

Oh, and by the way, we will be planning to do our next webinar with Dr. Pennell a week from tomorrow, at 8 PM EST. I’ll get a registration link up very shortly, for those interested in participating in the live discussion: we can have the chat function working for questions on the fly during the webinar itself, in addition to the questions coming in on the discussion forum in the days preceding it.

We can see how well this works and adjust as needed. I think it will be helpful and far more feasible to have a mechanism for GRACE to capitalize on the many experts out there who want to participate but can’t make a sustained time commitment.

One final question: are weekday evenings a good time? For many of the faculty, a weekend morning, such as 11:30 AM EST on Saturday or Sunday may be very feasible, but that may or may not be a good time for those of you who would be interested in being part of the live audience.

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