Elearning:Live Classroom information for instructors
Reasons for Using Live Classroom
For professors, teaching assistants, instructors and other faculty, Live Classroom can be a very useful tool in instruction and demonstration. In contrast with using tools such as MSN/Yahoo Messenger and Skype to conduct online meetings, Live Classroom introduces a professional interface for use in the academic environment. Integrated perfectly into Webct Vista, and ready to use almost immediately, new users adjust easily to the interface in a few short hours. Here are some scenarios where Live Classroom could be useful in a teaching environment:
- Online Office Hours for Profs and T.A's
- Tutorials and Question/Answer periods
- Group Presentations
- Guest Lecturers presenting remotely
- Distance Education courses
Live Classroom opens up a whole wealth of possibilities for learning online.
Presentation Tools
Archiving a Presentation
An archive is a recording of a live presentation that captures and synchronizes all events that occurred in the live presentation. It plays back all of the actions exactly as they occurred during the presentation including:
- All audio and/or video
- Public (but not private) text chat comments
- eBoard annotations
- Content
- Application Sharing and Advanced Polling
A more comprehensive guide to archiving presentations can be found here.
Breakout Rooms
During a presentation, you may move participants (and, optionally, yourself and/or other presenters) to Breakout Rooms for discussions and group work.
Participants (and you, if you elect to move yourself) will receive both audio and textual notification that they have been moved to a Breakout Room. The interface will reload and participants will have access to limited presentation tools. Within Breakout Rooms, participants have the ability to display content on-the-fly, send private messages to presenters regardless of their location and all participants in the room. A more comprehensive guide to Breakout Rooms can be found here.
Simple Polling
Yes/No polling is a great tool to ask simple 'yes' or 'no' questions and obtain instantaneous feedback that all participants can see. Presenters can verbally ask a Yes/No question, type the question through text chat, or present a slide that asks the question.
There are many potential uses for Yes/No polling - for example, you can verbally ask a Yes/No question at the beginning of the presentation to ensure that all participants can hear your audio. Participants who can hear you would click the Check (Yes) button. You (or an assistant) can then easily identify which participants are having difficulty and troubleshoot with them directly. Yes/No polling could also be used to ask for participants' opinions on a topic, to understand your participants' background knowledge on the topic you will discuss, to take a vote, or to ensure that participants have retained the knowledge you have given them.
Application Sharing
Live Classroom's Application Sharing tool lets you show or share any application running on your computer with all participants in a presentation. It is the ideal tool to use for:
- Showing dynamically changing content (such as giving an online tour of a website)
- Showing content that cannot be added to Live Classroom as slides (such as any proprietary software application on your desktop)
- Teaching participants to use a software applications
- Collaborating on documents and applications (such as a Microsoft Word document or Excel spreadsheet)
- Troubleshooting an end users' problem by having them show you their desktops (using Live Classroom's Remote AppShare Request feature)
A more comprehensive guide to Application Sharing can be found here.