Today has ended up being a day for looking at web conferencing software! This morning I went with Matt to London Knowledge Lab to look at Elluminate. We already have a licence for Wimba Live Classroom and unfortunately so far it hasn’t proved to be a reliable enough platform to recommend for use by LSE staff. Hence we are currently investigating various options in anticipation of interest from various LSE collaborative projects with other international institutions. This isn’t however an invitation for lots of phone calls from salespeople! We were fairly impressed with the functionality provided by Elluminate as well as hearing good things about its reliability. One interesting feature is that it buffers audio so that should there be any net congestion it will play catch-up with the audio by playing it at a faster than normal rate. I was slightly disappointed to find that it uses Java technology, including a rather (un)impressive 20 MB download before you can even get started. I guess this isn’t an issue so much when most people now have broadband access but it does provide a significant delay before you can get going. The big java applet does however mean that the interface is fully featured and not dependent on your web browser. It seems to do everything most people would need from a web conferencing system and most importantly it seems to make it fairly easy and it apparently just works. The only thing lacking in the current version seems to be a sensible way of managing video from more than one participant. Only one video feed is viewable at any time and the video doesn’t follow the audio automatically as it does with Live Classroom. There is also no way for the session moderator to switch the video feed from one participant to the other. We are hopefully going to try this out for ourselves sometime over the summer.
Coincidently our centre director forwarded me an invitation to a demonstration of dim dim being run by Jim Judges at the JISC Regional Support Centre for the West Midlands, so definitely not a sales pitch – just a straight demo/experimental web meeting. I’d already come across dim dim a couple of weeks ago and have been playing around with it so kind of already knew my way around; but I hadn’t tried using it in a live web meeting situation – which of course is the only way to test these things. I’ve been very impressed with the look and feel of the software and it uses a Flash streaming server for the audio and video rather than Java, which I’m happier with, but I guess not everyone would be. My experience at the meeting was pretty good, I could see and hear the main presenter perfectly and apparently everyone could see and hear me pretty well too. There were problems however with some of the participants having problems with their microphones – nobody could hear them or they were very quiet. It’s hard to know whether this was a fault with dim dim or not. However, there was one poor soul who didn’t seem to be able to see or hear anyone very easily and could only really contribute through text chat. There also seemed to be a few user interface problems – there were the volume slider bars for each speaking participant but for me they seemed to have no effect on the speakers’ sound level. I’m using Firefox so that shouldn’t really be a problem.
Interestingly, both of these systems integrate with Moodle – they appear as new activities and integrate user accounts, but I’ve not seen either of these integrations in action.Unfortunately it appears that the dim dim integration is limited to the open source “don’t use this in a production environment” version of the product, which is limited to 20 concurrent users. There isn’t much documentation on the dim dim website so it’s kind of hard to know whether this is true or not, maybe someone will read this and correct me! I shall update here if I hear otherwise. Anyway, I think I’ve gone on long enough – if you`re at the LSE and you`re interested in using this kind of technology please get in touch and we`ll see what we can do.
‘conference hall’ photo courtesy of shinemy from Flickr.com (licensed under Creative Commons)
The OU just bought into elluminate – here’s how the vendors announced it….
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS226161+31-Mar-2008+MW20080331
and here’s how Niall Sclater, imho the closest thing we have to an evangelist of ed tech actually used in the OU, put it, even though it’s not his job, probably (is it anybody’s?!)
http://sclater.com/blog/?p=81
I’ve not tried it out yet, but the one or two reports I’ve had from people I trust are, err…, hmm, was that the doorbell?
tony
Full Disclosure – I work for Elluminate. Very interesting read and happy to read that you’ve visited with Tim Neumann at the Knowledge Lab as he certainly represents a well-informed viewpoint on these technologies.
One quick correction… If Java is already loaded on your computer (as it is with most systems these days), Elluminate Live! itself is only an initial, one-time download of around 3MB. Once downloaded all of the features are available to you in an environment which is capable of the audio buffering that you mentioned as well as many other intelligent bandwidth management tasks.
If anyone is interested in experiencing Elluminate Live! you might be interested in our Free (3 user) vRoom offer: http://www.getvroom.com.
Has anyone had experience of using Elluminate for distance learning? When we trialled it a couple of years ago we had absolutely unsurmountable problems getting students on their home computers in Hong Kong, India, Australia and the UK up and running with the Java environment. Which is a pity. Has anyone else found anything with foolproof installation and operation and good audio (that doesn’t break the bank)?
We ended up using a webconferencing system from http://www.talkingcommunities.com in the end, which has the advantage of simplicity, but is comparatively very basic. Our main wish would be for something like audio buffering.
Interesting reading these articles. I am a recent graduate of 4 years ago and have subsequently worked for 2 web conferencing providors. The organisation I work for now, Megameeting is a flash based system, where there are NO downloads whatsoever and works on all Operating Systems. Several Universities are now using this software. Please visit http://www.megameeting.co.uk to see our pricing but whats more all training and support is free of charge.
Hmmm we tried a range of “free” webinar products which all work well but I have to say that the above claim from Megameeting is typical salesman BS – “NO downloads whatsoever” (apart from VNC, SMD plug-in, Outlook Meeting Addin, etc). I suggest you Try DimDim instead. It’s free and works..
Hello
We’re looking for a system that would need no software installs (no activex either).
I heard omnovia has a nice system (omnovia.com). I was also in one of the webinars by td ameritrade. They use omnovia. Has anyone used omnovia as presenter before? Is it easy to use? any feedback or advice would be appreciated.
The best resource on the web for finding the right web conferencing vendor, solution, or product is the annual product reviews and Top Ten list from the Web Conferencing Council. This free report is found on their site at http://www.webconferencingcouncil.com. This year’s best of class award went to VIA3 from http://www.viack.com, followed by GoToMeeting and WebEx.
I’m wondering if you’re familiar with Voxwire. It’s an up-and-comer in the web-conferencing world, offering better features at a much better price than anything out there. You can check it out at: http://www.voxwire.com. It’s poised to give these other guys a run for their money. I would be very interested to hear what you think of it.