Elluminate Session

After our meeting with Professor Nakazawa, we went into our hands-on session with Sage on Elluminate (Academic Edition). This edition of Elluminate is a real-time virtual classroom environment designed to enable & enhance collaboration via distance for academic institutions. Elluminate environment has the following interactive features; whiteboard, audio & text messaging & a raise your hands feature for students who wish to ask a question. The whiteboard operates very similar to the one in WebCT whereby drawings can be made & there is also capability to import screen captures, image files, cliparts. Text can also be inserted into the whiteboard but its quite limited in this area. There is a "point of interest" feature where it offers options such as I got an idea iconized by a light bulb, a pointing finger icon pointing to a particular part of a human organ for instance. For a session to be conducted effectively, 10-12 participants is ideal. It is also possible to share multimedia but with low bandwith environments this will present a challenge. The audio portion of Elluminate works very well in a low bandwidth environment but the images uploaded may take time loading. It is also possible to bring out various applications such as word, excel etc. & would be particularly ideal for our computer science courses for programming application demonstrations. It is also has a powerpoint feature as well. It is also possible to conduct web tours where the moderator of a session can switch to a website which may relate to subject area in session. It is also possible to create breakout or private virtual groups in a session depending upon the preferences of the moderator.
In terms of costs, obtaining a license to use Elluminate is according to the no. of seats which also includes moderators of sessions. CDE currently shares a license with K-12 schools. This arrangement is ideal for them because most sessions for CDE are conducted after 4pm & the K-12 schools take up the earlier hours within a 24 hour period. This certainly helps in meeting the costs of using Elluminate. Elluminate offers the option of hosting the application on their server as well but at an extra cost. There are other vendors that also offer similar features such as HorizonLive, Genesis and Macromedia Breeze.