COVID-19 has been a historic time to work at Johns Hopkins University. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center was one of TIME magazine’s inventions of the year, Dr. Anthony Fauci has been a virtual guest numerous times to university-wide events, and at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, what began as the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife took on new meaning as nurses became “#HealthcareHeroes” and stepped into the spotlight. Also here at the SON, some of our faculty got a lot of media attention.
A few that became frequent media commentators wanted to do a live Q&A to answer questions from regular people. We decided to do either a Facebook Live or a YouTube Live, settling on Facebook because our Facebook audience is larger. The REACH Initiative (a center in the SON) led coordination for the event, I offered guidance for developing the questions, promoting the event and developing the logistics of the event. Working with IT, we determined that we would host our panelists on Zoom, feed the Zoom panel to Facebook Live, and then copy questions from social media to a shared Google document that all the panelists could see and the moderator, our Dean, could read.
The event was very successful, with lots of questions submitted; the primary coordinator and I manned the event, she held concurrent watch parties in a variety of Facebook groups while I fielded questions from the main page and live-tweeted. Afterward, I downloaded the event, uploaded in its entirety to our YouTube channel, and posted a recap blog to On The Pulse.
We decided to do one Facebook Live per month -- our November event was The Border is Here, The Crisis is Real for Our Children and the Time is Now. It occurred the day before the election and had over 20,000 viewers; in December we will discuss 2021 predictions.