34 Washington Colleges Move into Online Course Delivery
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges is rolling out a new system to deliver online classes, presentations, and meetings. The organization recently signed on with Elluminate to use that company's Elluminate Learning Suite across its 34 member colleges.
The Elluminate Learning Suite is an expanded collection of Elluminate's collaborative learning tools. It includes the Elluminate Next bundle and Elluminate's flagship Live! e-learning software.
Elluminate Live! is an e-learning, conferencing, and online collaboration tool designed for use in education. It includes features like note taking, two-way interactive video, archiving and automatic indexing of e-learning sessions, various tools for teachers (timers, pop-up announcements, sorting of participants by hand raising, etc.), whiteboarding, and various other collaboration tools. Live! also provides support for a variety of learning management systems, including Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, WebCT, and eCollege. Integration with Angel LMS is also planned for the near future. Elluminate provides an SDK called "Bridge" for integrating its technologies with LMS and portal solutions.
The Elluminate Next bundle incorporates Elluminate Publish! and Elluminate Plan!, a tool designed to help instructors and instructional designers organize and package content for online sessions prior to the session being conducted live.
Through the agreement, Washington colleges will use the Elluminate Learning Suite to deliver online and blended courses, Webinars, and various online meetings.
"We are excited about our new partnership with Elluminate," said Cable Green, eLearning director for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, in a statement released Tuesday. "Their tools allow us to provide Web-based, synchronous learning spaces where students and faculty can share ideas and learn together. In addition, the State Board and all of our colleges plan to use Elluminate rooms to facilitate online meetings and professional development webinars."
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges supports 34 colleges that collectively serve some 450,000 students.