A timely publication:
http://www.kineo.com/elearning-tips/virtual-classrooms-.html
merv stapleton
director of learning resources
city of sunderland college
bede centre
durham road
sunderland
sr3 4ah
Tel: 0191 511 6153
Mobile: 07921 484799
-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dr. Dragos
Ciobanu
Sent: 27 February 2009 10:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Virtual Classroom Alternatives
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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