The CLIPP department are helping the Aston sustainability agenda by promoting awareness to staff and students of potential carbon emission savings that can be made when running webinars and virtual classrooms. Aston University has a licence for Collaborate, which enables live (web based) presentations or classrooms via a PC and using a web browser. A presenter can be sat in front of their PC (and web cam) and “broadcast” to hundreds of delegates simultaneously across the globe. Delivery of presentation slides, web tours, and interactive activities are all possible with Collaborate.
Case study
A typical example of this was run recently by the Business School Alumni department. The 45 minute webinar hosted by Dr Patrick Tissington was a resounding success with 80 delegates from Aston, UK and internationally. Kevin Brace has been working with the Environment Team to calculate the carbon emissions saved in the ‘Effective Global Teams’ webinar. We calculated that around 7.5 tonnes of carbon emissions were saved through this international webinar. This equates to approximately 11 flights from New York to London. (Ref: http://visualization.geblogs.com/)
Uses of Collaborate
This illustrates the potential carbon and travel savings for typical delegates and students. This is just one typical example of how a tool like Collaborate can be exploited. Others include;
For more information...
Contact Kevin Brace (ext. 4230) or Neil Cocklin (ext. 4218).
To watch a video about the software, go to the CLIPP web pages.
Read the CLIPP blog post that describes how Collaborate is being used at Aston.
Take a look at Kevin Brace's article talking about amplifying events.
Download the green meeting guide which helps to contextualise the issues.
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