Depending upon your subject, it may be possible to carry on activities or provide information relevant to your subject without holding any meetings. If everyone has access to Skype, Facetime, Zoom, etc. then some sort of virtual meeting is possible. Third Age Trust have promised technical help if we want to go ahead with tools like Zoom (Note: only one member, say the co-ordinaotor, needs to instal Zoom on their machine – members join by clicking on a link sent by the meeting host). However to be realistic, that is probably only going to work for a small fraction of members.
What is perhaps simpler is to provide links to online material. Some possible ideas for sources are given in this link, but you will no doubt have more specific ideas. If it is helpful, please send us the web links of your choice and we will post them on your Group page. You can then exchange e-mail comments, or you could set up a Whatsapp group to share comments that way. I’m sure that some groups are already doing this.
It is quite feasible to post Powerpoint presentations on the website – not ideal as you don’t get the personal comments with the slide, but again something we may need to consider. It might just require a little editing to include more printed comments among the slides. However we have to be careful over copyright if including any material from published sources.
We are investigating discussion boards as tools of the website, so you might have your own discussion board as part of your Group page. We have resisted this idea thus far as it requires each participant to register and be given a password, which we thought would be an unwanted complication for most people. However with the time predicted before we get back to normal stretching ever further into the future, this might be something that is necessary.
If you have other ideas, please let us know.