Friday, July 10, 2009

Hosting Your Own Free Webinars in Elluminate

This is an exciting day for us at LearnCentral! We have our initial set of procedures for you to hold your own public web meetings in the LearnCentral Elluminate room. Wahoo!

LearnCentral allows educators to use a free public Elluminate room to hold large webinars or group meetings. To qualify, the events must be 1) education-oriented, 2) free (you're not charging those who attend), 3) recordable (will be done automatically), and 4) available to anyone to attend. We're really excited to see what you do with this capability, and are hoping that it allows you to regularly gather other educators around curricular interests in "historic" ways.

The current instructions are below. This is a new service, so your feedback (and help!) are greatly appreciated.

Join LearnCentral

To host a meeting, first join LearnCentral and then join the "Host Your Own Webinars" group.

Before Scheduling a Meeting

We ask that you go through the live or recorded free Elluminate training (http://www.elluminate.com/support/training/index.jsp) before hosting a session, and suggest strongly that you attend another session as a participant to see how an Elluminate session works. Please don't go in without any actual experience--it won't be good for you or your attendees! :) This is an honor system, but we do ask that you are prepared as we don't want these free sessions to reflect poorly on Elluminate!

To Schedule a Meeting

To schedule a meeting in the LearnCentral public-use Elluminate room, please create the event using the calendar for this group by going to the events tab here and clicking on "Create Event." Please check the calendar first and take care not to schedule over another event. Please also leave at least 30 minutes before and after each event (so that you and the organizer who follows you both have time to come into the room to prepare before your events).

The URL to put in the calendar event, or to give out to others to attend, is https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=lcevents&password=Webinar_Guest. You can also use this shortened version: http://tinyurl.com/lcparticipant. Participants do not need to be members of LearnCentral to attend the event, but please encourage them to join!

Once your event is scheduled in the group calendar, you are welcome to also add it to the calendars of other groups you are a part of. If you believe your event might be of interest to the LearnCentral community as a whole, please email me at stevehargadon@elluminate.com so that I can place it on the community calendar. You also need to email me for the moderator log-in information of this is your first time holding a LearnCentral Elluminate meeting.

Please keep meetings to under two hours in order for others to be able to use the room. If you need a session that is longer than two hours, please contact me directly. Also, the LearnCentral Elluminate room has limit of 300 participants. If you believe that you will need to accommodate more than this number, please contact me directly as well.

The Actual Meeting

When you enter the room, there will be one or two standard slides that we ask that you leave in place. Any slide you want to upload should be placed after our default slides.

If you need to set up a telephone bridge, see the instructions in the Elluminate manual at http://www.elluminate.com/support/docs/9.5/telephony/index.jsp. You'll need to have your own conference call system and dial-in number.


Ending a Meeting

When your session is over, please clear the room of all participants, yourself included. The room must be empty for the recording to process. If you have participants who have left the session running and don't exit on their own, you can click on them in the participant window, then right-click to manually remove.

After a Meeting
When your meeting is done, you will need to find your recording link and place in the post-event URL. The Recording Table is at https://sas.elluminate.com/drtbl?suid=D.40F698971780B7AEE5FAD85F5E2D6D. Look for the date and time of your session for the link.

With that, we hope you have fun and find lots of good uses for this service!

2 comments:

  1. Steve, this sounds like a great service. Thanks for working to make it available to the education community! I think it'll give a lot of educators a up close look at a superior webinar tool.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My concerns are allowing students into Learn Central and allowing anyone into Elluminate meetings. I think there needs to be an educator only space and a screening process. Call me a worry wart.

    ReplyDelete

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