Mark McCahill is talking about Duke’s use of Elluminate Live for synchronous conferencing. It started with a dream for a university-wide web conferencing system, where people could easily create their own meetings. They wanted to integrate with the ID management system and to be able to archive and retrieve meetings on demand.
There are uses for new purposes, like providing live classroom support via web conferencing.
All of the vendors are using boutique proprietary software, whether hosted or locally provisioned. There’s no way to integrate.
Mark shows a video of provisioning a web conference in less than a minute.
Duke’s experience after a year of use is that 308 used the meeting set-up page, with around 636 meeting spaces created, some which have ongoing multiple visits. About 150 meetings have been recorded.
Over 100 departments have used it, about half have created multiple spaces. Most meetings are small, 2-4 participants, 25% have 5-10.
Costs are $2/seat license. There’s a brain (server) plus a cold spare, 2 session pool servers, each running 200 live sessions. Storage space is 50 Mb with screen capture, or 0.5 without.
Support issues – ad-hoc usage peaks outside business hours – 8-10 pm for professional schools, and other hours for the Duke Singapore campus.
There’s overlap here with audio conferences, video conferences, and immersive virtual worlds.
One of the issues is being able to record and archive meetings to standard formats.
In response to a question, Mark notes that there are definitely some learning issues in participating and hosting online meetings, no matter what technology is used.
In discussion, dimdim is mentioned as a new, open, service that is not as full-featured as the commercial offerings but holds promise.
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