Last month I blogged about an illuminating few months, where I had been using the web conferencing tool Elluminate in a number of ways. In that blog post I mentioned a range of web conferencing  / synchronous communication and collaboration tools and said that I would blog about them in more detail at a later date … well here I am!

Yesterday saw the first of our JISC RSC Wales roadshows for 2011. ‘Advance and Enhance‘ is about looking beyond the classroom  at how technology can help learning providers and partnerships share, blend and deliver in the classroom and also at a distance. My part in the roadshow is a session on synchronous communcations, which is entitled ‘Is face to face the only answer?‘ and which is about teaching and learning in real time using technology to break down barriers of location, time, money, weather …

As I am sure you will have guessed, ‘Is face to face the only answer?’ is really a rhetorical question, which I’m sure that most would agree the answer to is ‘no, it can’t be’ when refering to teaching and learning, especially when considering that most learning providers are aiming to reach more students regardless of location, to save money and time, to be as inclusive as possible for learners with disabilities or difficulties accessing physical learning environments and, as mentioned in my previous post, to not allow the weather to disrupt the teaching and learning. So, if face to face can’t be the only answer, how can technology help?

In preparation for my session at the roadshow and because it is increasingly an area of interest to the learning providers we support and as a way for us to deliver our service more flexibly, the JISC RSC Wales team have been looking at a range of the web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools that are currently available and being used already in education by a number of organisations. As a geographically distributed team we use a range of synchronous communication tools because we can’t be face to face a lot of the time. With regard to the service we offer we have had to look at different ways of delivering face to face sessions (like the roadshows) because of the reasons mentioned above (geography of our audience and the team, cost, time …). As a consequence we have come up with a way of using technology to deliver bite sized chunks of information in real time to you at your desk in the form of our ‘Lunchtime Bytes’ series of online events, delivered via Elluminate. It is our experiences with Elluminate that have informed our informal evaluations of a range of other web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools, which I can now share with you via an information and resources area in our Moodle at: http://moodle.rsc-wales.ac.uk/webconferencing

This online area contains a database of the web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools that we have looked at so far. We hope to expand this as we are able to evaluate more of these tools but for now it contains our thoughts and experiences of Elluminate, vRoom, Adobe Connect Pro, Nefsis, DimDim, Big Blue Button, vYew, EVO and Skype. As you will see, there are a mix of paid for, free and open source alternatives. Some of the tools are aimed at business and some at education. Some of the tools are more suitable for formal delivery or meetings and others are more suited for informal communication and collaboration. The online area also looks at why you might want to use this technology as well as what you might use it for and also how others are using it already.

As I said when I shared this with the delegates at our roadshow, our part in all of this is to let you (the teaching and learning experts)  know what tools (technology) is out there and to suggest how it could potentially help your organisation, its staff, learners and partners to communicate and collaborate in real time, even if you can’t be face to face. Whilst always considering the teaching and learning, the focus has been on the technology but then, as suggested today in this post by James Clay ‘you have to start from somewhere and by explaining the potential that learning technologies offer, you are starting from a good place that will open minds to future potential and possibilities‘

Tags: Adobe Connect Pro, Advance and Enhance Roadshow, Big Blue Button, DimDim, Elluminate, EVO, Lunchtime Bytes, Nefsis, Skype, vRoom, vYew

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 5:42 pm and is filed under elearning, Learning Technology, virtual environments, web conferencing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.