Having not figured out a good name for our two-site workshops, where one group is in a lab on campus and other in Elluminate, I’m going with simul-learn for now. It doesn’t work any better than the others we tried (polycast? simulcast? doesn’t sugggest interactivity….) but it’ll do till we think of something better.
Ben Daley at High Tech High contacted me last week because he’s doing the same thing: offering a presenter (last week his speaker was online in Elluminate) to a class on campus (two cameras) and students also attending via Elluminate. All is being done, as we do it, not through complex teleconferencing setups (soooo 20th century) but via computer webcams/videocams and Elluminate. He was under the impression not many people are doing this.
The setup isn’t that easy, though. We had our third experience Friday: the Elluminate recording is here. Previous experiences are related in a previous post.
We had a few difficulties, and they were entirely different from last time (<- lesson here!). AIS had helpfully brought a wireless microphone so our presenter wasn’t tethered, and we tested it in advance. But in the actual session, the presenter’s voice was muffled because the Elluminate session needed to be set at USB mic input and no one knew that. Our intrepid Laura Paciorek figured it out after about 5 minutes, but at first our presenter was trapped at the computer because the sound was so bad the people in Elluminate could not hear him clearly.
We also had a peek-a-boo problem. In Elluminate, it is possible to send “private” chat messages to certain people. The moderators (me and Pilar Hernández online, Laura alone because our other in-lab helper was out with an emergency) talked to each other about the setup and sound throughout the workshop. Unfortunately, because the presentation computer was logged in as our presenter, with moderator privileges, all private exchanges could be seen on the big screen in the lab (luckily, they did not appear on the recording). That won’t do, and means two computers, which we had going anyway for two webcams. The presentation computer can be logged in as moderator, but needs to have the chat set to show only public chat.
Afterward, Laura and I stayed in Elluminate to debrief. She took some shots of the setup with the webcam, and we worked on the whiteboard to create this image of the setup, instructions in case someone else needs to do this (click on the image for larger version):
