We had a useful (and pleasurable) meeting with our colleagues from Macedonia on May 1, and we were able to make some good progress with the project.

School director Zaneta Trajkoska and senior lecturer Snezana Trpevska came over for a short visit, and they filled in a lot of the blanks for us.

We’re connected on Facebook and on Twitter, which might help the process – though I think we all want to run this project by the book and make sure everything is copied into university systems for the record. We have email accounts on their network, which is a great help for this.

Zaneta and Snezana were very helpful on the technical issues, and gave us a short briefing on the students.

The students
We’ll have 19 students on the team, and they’re all journalists with varying experience.

• They’re aged between 26 and 40;
• Most have journalism degrees, but the team will also incude business, marketing and literature graduates.
• They come from a range of backgrounds, so we should have representatives from all (or most) of the communities in Macedonia.

First step
As a first step, we need to find out more about our students. We’re asking them to do a short survey about their background and experience to get an idea of how much technical support they’ll need. We also want to get to know them as much as we can in a short time. It’s important to try to get as close as we can to the same relationship we have with our Lincoln students.

Tech issues: computer says  …  yes
These are just about solved. We’re going with the system in Skopje. We’ve all been given accounts to access their intranet, and we’re using WizIq to deliver the course.

We’ve excellent ICT support from both sides. A test run on May 9 was a bit rough at the edges, but everyone was confident it would be much smoother on the night. We’ve arranged another test for May 16, so more to follow on this.

Management structure
We’ve run along fairly smoothly, but it’s obviously a bit ad hoc, given that it’s a first for us, and that the schedule is very tight.

For future reference, we might think about a clearer split between technical, curriculum and admin tasks. UNESCO is involved in funding the project, so there is some fairly onerous bureaucracy, and we’ll have to look at how the workload panned out.

We also need to think about balancing email overload with making sure everyone knows everything they need to know.

All that having been said, I quite like the overlaps. It isn’t that confusing; and it does mean you get oversight of your task, and input from colleagues.

We tend to break up into small teams for particular tasks anyway, and we’ve been able to support each other as needed. I’d much prefer to stay at this end of the formality spectrum. It seems more in line with this type of project.

The Skopje project has expanded somewhat. The first series of lectures will be augmented by another round in September, which will be delivered by the head of the LSJ, Professor John Tulloch, and Professors Brian Winston and Richard Keeble.

We also now know a little more about our students. We don’t have any names or profiles yet, but we do know they are all working journalists. This is excellent for us – I’m sure we’re hoping to learn a lot from them about the media landscape in the Balkans, and it will be good to have them as colleagues.

The timetable is now pretty much set up. I’ll try to sort out a calendar next week.

Technical issues
The technical issues are still a little in the air, but we have made progress.Some of our colleagues from our network service (ICT) have come on board. They’ve given us some excellent advice, and they’ve highlighted some resources and systems we might use.

They’ve also helped us focus on the detailed questions we need to ask our colleagues in Skopje.

To sum up:

• we have a videoconferencing set-up called Lifesize installed at three sites in Lincoln.
• our colleagues from Macedonia have sent us a helpful presentation on Wiziq, the virtual classroom system they use, and they seemed to think we can hook up to that and use it for our lectures.
• it turns out that we use Sharepoint for our intranet at Lincoln, which is helpful if that forms part of the project.
• we’ve more or less dropped the idea of using open-source software and social media to deliver the lectures.
• Skype is very much a fall-back for this round, though we’ll almost certainly use it for the next round. The colleagues involved then are unlikely to be on-site.
• we still need to nail down all the connection details – what they need, what we need, what’s compatible, etc.

Meetings
We’re meeting our Macedonian colleagues next week, when they’re over for a three-day visit, and the plan is to sort out as many of those details as we can then, and to pass on questions for those we can’t.

More later …