I've been playing quite a bit with Adobe Connect Pro (as well as Wimba Live
Classroom). The reasons I prefer Adobe Connect Pro are:
- it's Flash-based rather than Java-based and that takes care of tons of
problems; moreover, Flash compression is quite good, which makes the whole
thing quite fast.
- you can have resizable areas on the screen (chat, video, presentation)
which is also a banus if you want to focus on something in particular
- you can change the status of the participants (from participant to presenter
or host without then having to log out and log back in)
- the cherry on the cake for me was that you can have several webcam feeds
displayed at the same time (we really needed that!) I'm not aware of other
Virtual Classroom environments which offer that, but please let me know if I'm
wrong!
In terms of pricing, while it isn't cheap, apparently discounts can be arranged -
get in touch with Jigsaw Systems who are the UK resellers.
On the other hand, I also saw the DimDim demo Karen was mentioning and
spoke a little with the company that had implemented it and integrated it into
Moodle. It's free and open-source but be prepared to spend some time setting
it up. One that's done, it seems to work beautifully except for the fact that I
don't think you can have concurrent rooms... so the scheduling must be quite
reliable...
Hope this helps,
Dragos :)
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