Faculty to Faculty: Elluminate
Teaching online is great, but how do you get that one-on-one, classroom feel when you and your students are scattered around the campus, state, or even globe? Elluminate offers a great solution.
Lauren Hertel, faculty from the Department of Telecommunication, has used it extensively for virtual classroom interaction and online office hours in three of her multimedia skills courses. What follows is her best advice for using Elluminate Live! Virtual Classroom
Establish a funding mechanism
Before you get too excited about everything Elluminate can do, you need to figure out how you’re going to pay the licensing fee.
- UF pays the bulk of the cost, but there is still a $6.69 fee for every FTE who will use the license in a year.
- Currently, this cannot be passed along to students as a course fee or in any other way, including selling it through one of the local bookstores as a license.
- The good news is that many departments on campus have already purchased bulk licenses, and if you are in one of those units then Elluminate is probably yours for the asking. You can find out if your department already participates, as well as get more information about the license, at software.ufl.edu/elluminate.
Play early, play often
The basics of Elluminate are simple, but having 20, 50, or 200 students in the system at a time can become a bit of a three ring circus!
- It’s critical– let me restate that, IT’S CRITICAL!– that you learn and experiment with the system before you try to run your first class in it.
- Attend CITT’s online Elluminate training session, get a bunch of faculty or grad students together to play around, and learn how the system functions from the presenter and the student perspectives.
- Then as you get more comfortable, try out some of the other features like quizzes and polling. Just remember to learn the new tools and test it BEFORE you spring it on your students!
Require the correct equipment
Using Elluminate doesn’t have to be expensive for you or your students, but there are a few key things to add to your syllabus:
- Include a USB headset with headphones and a microphone in your course requirements. It is NOT enough to use the built in devices on a computer or to just require headphones. You’ll end up with distorted audio feedback loops that make it impossible to communicate. Even if you’re not using audio for your class sessions (the chat window usually works just fine!), you’ll want students to have headsets for office hours, when trying to troubleshoot via chat makes even the most patient person want to drive nails under her own fingertips!
- Encourage students to use a high-speed internet connection. Elluminate has wonderful support for lower bandwidth, but it’ll make you crazy waiting for students’ screens to load or for their audio to catch up.
Require test sessions of all students
You might be tempted to skip this and let students figure it out as they go along, but they’re not as good at new technology as you might think:
- Students need to set up their own computers for Elluminate, which is quite easy using the company’s help page. Downloading the software can take some time, so make them set everything up and test it BEFORE they meet you for the first time in the system.
- Include several test sessions in the first week or two of class, and make attendance at one of them mandatory to continue in the class.
- In the sessions, show students how to use the writeboard, chat, and desktop sharing. Also test their audio setup and chat with each of them individually to make certain you’re not hearing any audio feedback loops.
Record your sessions
Elluminate allows you to record everything that happens in a session, which is useful for the following reasons:
- Having access to recordings can help students review the material
- Recordings provide a backup for students who missed class
- You can reuse lectures, especially when a guest speaker was there, in future semesters
Offer additional office hours online
This is one of my favorite uses of Elluminate:
- I offer online office hours in Elluminate on Monday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, but I could offer them Sunday nights or daily at 7 a.m. if I wanted to! The point is, I sit at home, make dinner, watch tv… whatever!… while logged into Elluminate.
- Students can come by and get help at times that work for their schedules.
- My students consistently tell me how helpful it is to have access to me so much from home.
Sing Elluminate’s praises!
If you try Elluminate and decide you like it, here’s what you should do next:
- Tell your colleagues! You can even get a free conferencing room for 3 participants at Elluminate.com. This is a great way to experiment with the service and get colleagues interested. It might even be a good way to catch up with loved ones throughout the day!
- Tell your boss! You can use Elluminate to be more productive from home, which is music to every chair’s ears.
- Tell the university! UF is considering sponsoring the entire license fee for Elluminate, but will only do so if enough of us use the system and give it high ratings.
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Tags: Instructional Design, Teaching Online
Posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009.