On behalf of the Sloan Consortium Steering Committee, thank you again for agreeing to present at the 4th Annual International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Online Learning, July 11-13, 2011, at The Fairmont San Jose in San Jose, California. The following guidelines are meant to help you with your preparations to present at the symposium. Should you have additional questions after reading these guidelines, please contact the Sloan-C Conference Management Team at conference@sloanconsortium.org.

Presentation Schedule:

The conference website Program page has a complete listing of sessions where you may find the date and time assigned for your presentation. Click here to search for your presentation date/time/room assignment. You may search a number of ways – by track, by presentation type, presenter name, etc. – to find your presentation. The simplest way to find your session is by the links for session types (pre-conference workshop, information session, featured session, poster, etc.) at the top of the page. Click on the link for your presentation type and you will see the full listing of that category of presentations.  To find your session easily, hit "Control F", type your last name in the Find box, and you'll see the link to the page with the description for your session.

Any changes to presenters, session titles, descriptions, bios, etc. must be submitted no later than Friday, June 10 to chinkley@sloanconsortium.org.

Registration:

All presenters must register by May 11. Any presenter unable to register by May 11 should contact Christine Hinkley, Director of Conference Services, at chinkley@sloanconsortium.org with a description of the issue and the time frame you expect it to be resolved within. Register online or email or fax the manual registration form to Gail Sullivan at 888-898-6209 or email gsullivan@sloanconosortium.org. We do encourage you to register online if possible.

The Sloan Consortium is offering a discounted one-year individual membership to all conference presenters as a thank you for your participation in this conference. Details on how to take advantage of this offer will be emailed to you after the symposium. 

Hotel Reservations:

Make your hotel reservations at the Fairmont San Jose by Monday, June 28 in order to secure the special Sloan-C conference attendee rate of $145/night plus taxes. These rates are available for three days prior to and following the conference, should you choose to extend your stay in San Jose.

Structure of the Sessions: 

Please refer to the conference website if you are uncertain about your presentation type or length. It will be listed as part of your presentation description.

A/V Equipment:

Each room is equipped with an LCD projector, a wired Internet connection to the podium, laptop audio output capability, a podium and a screen. Computers are not provided. Each presenter must bring his own laptop. LCD projectors are installed with a universal VGA cable to accommodate both PC and Macintosh systems. Make certain that your computer is properly configured and all the necessary plug-ins have been pre-loaded prior to your presentation.

If you are using a non-PC device to present, be sure to bring the appropriate adapters. If you are presenting using an Apple Macintosh computer, PLEASE remember to bring your video adapter – specifically, the adapter that converts your computer’s video output to VGA. A VGA connector looks like the standard 15-pin monitor connector.

In addition, because of the idiosyncrasies of internet traffic, you should consider loading Web pages onto a flash drive rather than trying to call them up live. If you have technical questions or other A/V needs not mentioned above, please contact RT Brown at rtbrown@sloanconsortium.org immediately.

Live Webcast Sessions:

Certain sessions have been designated for live webcast from the conference for virtual attendee viewing. Please review the streamed session schedule on the program page of the website to determine if your session has been designated for broadcast. If so, at least one presenter from each broadcast session must complete the presenter release form. Please note that the release form asks the lead presenter for each live streamed session to upload a profile picture which will be used in the streamed session catalog. The size of the image should be at least 300-400 pixels wide (a few inches).

Beyond the release form, no additional preparation is required for live-webcast presenters. You will have a session chair at your presentation to introduce your session as well as monitor questions during the broadcast from virtual attendees and present those to you on their behalf during Q & A. Your session chair will make contact with you prior to the start of the conference.

All webcast sessions will be available on-demand post-conference to all onsite and virtual attendees for 1 year. If you have any questions regarding the webcast sessions, contact the conference management team at conference@sloanconsortium.org. 

Presentation Hand-outs and Visuals:

Due to the number of presentations, we are unable to make photocopies of any presentation materials, either onsite or prior to the conference. We encourage you to post your presentation and any support materials to the conference proceedings repository. If you feel you must provide handouts during your presentation, we recommend bringing at least 35-50 copies. If there are extra handouts, you may bring them to the Registration Desk and they will be displayed for others to pick-up.

Upload your Presentation to the Conference Repository:

All presenters are required to upload their PowerPoint presentations, handouts, etc. by July 1 to the conference repository. This material, along with the full abstract and information about the authors, becomes part of the conference materials that remain on the website.  Presenters will receive a separate email with upload instructions from the Director of IT in early June.

We encourage you to upload prior to the conference; all uploads will be posted to the website in the weeks following the conference.

Publication of Papers:

Conference presenters are invited to submit full journal papers to the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN) after the completion of the conference. These are the stated guidelines for the journal: These papers should be full papers, which include scientific rigor and data. The results presented should clearly advance our field by providing new information. Papers that are purely anecdotal or have no research underlayment will not be considered for publication. Papers are typically 10 to 20 pages printed and conform to the guidelines for publication found at http://www.sloanconsortium.org/publications/jaln_main. Authors are encouraged to contact either John Bourne (jbourne@sloanconsortium.org) or Janet Moore (jmoore@sloanconsortium.org) to secure a reading.

Sessions Chairs and Door Monitors:

Each session will have either a session chair or a door monitor. All live-webcast sessions will have session chairs, who will notify the AV manager if the presenter is having technical issues, introduce the presentation to the onsite and virtual audiences, monitor the live webcast, collect virtual attendee questions to pose to the presenter(s) during Q & A, and collect session evaluations at the end of the session to return to the registration desk.

Non-webcast sessions will have door monitors, who will report technical issues to the AV manager and collect session evaluations at the end of the session.

If you are interested in volunteering as a session chair, please follow these steps (you may sign-up for more than one session to chair):

Step 1:
Log-in to your Sloan Consortium account at www.sloanconsortium.org (If you don’t have an account with Sloan-C, you can easily create one ).

Step 2:
Go to http://sloanconsortium.org/sloan-c/grant-role/volunteer_for_chair  

Step 3:
Join the Group “Sloan-C 2011 ET4Online”

Step 4:
On the left side you’ll see “Sloan-C Links”; click on “Volunteer to be a Session Chair”

Step 5:
Sessions are listed in chronological order (live webcast pre-conference workshops are listed first, followed by the keynote address and then the regular conference program). Select the session you would like to chair. Click on the button “I will chair this session” under the session description.
You will then see a message “Please select the button below, ‘I will chair this session’ to continue.” Click the “I will chair this session button” to confirm.

You will be able to determine which sessions you can’t volunteer to chair by looking at the bottom of the session description. If there is a name there, it means that person is chairing that session. You won’t see your name under your sessions, though. Instead, you’ll see a message “I am unable to now chair this session.” 

Step 6:
If you change your mind and decide not to chair that session, click the “I am unable to now chair this session.” You’ll see a message “You sure?” and click “I am unable to now chair this session” once more. You are officially off the hook for that session. You’ll see the message at the end of the session is once more “I will chair this session,” meaning its open to be claimed again by someone else.

We will provide a training session for session chairs prior to the conference and an instruction sheet onsite for additional guidance. Look for an email from the Sloan-C conference team in the near future with full details. As always, the training session will be recorded so that you have access to the information should you be unable to attend the live training session.

If for some reason your ability to chair a session changes, please let us know immediately at conference@sloanconsortium.org.
 

Promote your Session and the Conference:

Lets work together to create some buzz about your participation in this symposium! Please promote your own presentation as well as the symposium in general to your colleagues and social networks. The Twitter hashtag for this symposium is #et4ol2011. Feel free to create hashtag for your own presentation as well. Presenters may email their Twitter hashtags to conference@sloanconsortium.org by June 1 for inclusion in the program book. We also suggest you post hashtags at the start of your session and encourage attendees to use them.

• Twitter How-to's:

Please help spread the word about the conference and your presentation sessions. If you do not have one already, create a Twitter account. After you have done that, copy the url from your session listing on the Sloan-C ET4Online website and paste it into the bit.ly url shortener. Write a message that is 140 characters or less, include your bit.ly url and the ET4Online hashtag (#et4ol2011) and post! Any tweets that contain the #et4ol2011 hashtag will show up in the conference Twitter stream that is displayed on the website here.

• Facebook How-to's:

To promote your session on Facebook, first join the Sloan-C groups for this conference.  There are two groups - the Sloan-C group and the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning group.  After joining the group, post your message.  We encourage you to provide a link to your presentation page on the ET4OL website.

When you Arrive at the Conference:

• Pick-up your name badge at the conference registration desk (Market Street Foyer). Registration is open Monday morning at 7:30 am.
• Check the online program book to verify your session time/room. Last minute changes are always possible.

Session Evaluations:

Each session, with the exception of the keynote and plenaries, will have evaluation forms distributed to attendees in the session. Those forms will be collected, tabulated by the conference management team, and the results sent to you in the weeks following the conference. Keynote and plenary sessions will have their evaluations gathered in the online post-conference survey.
 

Guidelines for Live Webcast Presenters

Please take a moment to review the following documents prior to your session.

Presenter Considerations - A useful guide to prepare the presenters.
Mediasite Player - Features, functions and technical requirements for the viewing audience.

Mediasite Test Presentation - Mediasite presentations will play with any major internet browser. Use the following links to ensure a successful playback experience.

www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasitetest
www.sonicfoundry.com/silverlighttest