CALMet Commons: One-Year Old

While the CALMet Conference and the working group that supports has been around for more than 20 years, CALMet Commons just began its second year last month. It was officially announced during the CALMet Conference, in Toulouse, in the last week of August, 2013.

Has it achieved its goals? Let’s take a look.

Over the course of that first year, CALMet Commons (www.calmet.org) has hosted 22 new blog posts, from 16 unique contributors, and these have received 59 comments from readers. The topics range from new techniques for online and classroom training, assessment, evaluation, related conferences, pedagogy, technological tools for training, active learning, MOOCs, and more. At the top right of the CALMet Commons home page you can see the Labels (keywords) people have attached to posts. These can be used as search terms themselves, by the way.

The basic numbers show a modest but genuine success. The developers of the site hoped to average one blog post per month, and we have actually nearly doubled that. We hoped for at least twelve unique authors, and we have exceeded that. We hoped to gather 60 regular subscribers to receive email updates of all blog posts and comments, which is a critical mass equal to the normal size of a normal face-to-face conference, and we are more than half way there at 36.

However, in terms of usage, we are happy to have our expectations exceeded. CALMet Commons, which hosts not just a blog, but general information about CALMet Online and upcoming and past CALMet Conferences as well, has had over 13,000 page views since its exception, and the recent month saw 1700 views. People are using it, and not just subscribers and those posting.

As the second year of CALMet Commons moves forward, please share the posts you find useful with your colleagues, and encourage them to subscribe to the feed so they do not miss new posts. Also encourage them, and plan yourself, to share a blog post about new experiences, new ideas encountered that might inform our work, or anything other trainers and educators in our disciplines might find interesting and useful. Don’t wait until CALMet 2015 to share.