Elluminate: A Resource for Building Community within the Ohio Learning Network
By Cable T. Green
Ohio Learning Network
The Ohio Learning Network (www.oln.org) is
charged by the Ohio Board of Regents with assisting colleges and universities
to prepare for the knowledge economy. As such, OLN works closely and cooperatively
with Ohio’s public and private institutions of higher education to meet
this mission. A common course catalog (OhioLearns!) to help Ohioans locate online
courses, E 4 ME, an innovative online course to give new learners a taste of
eLearning, shared WebCT, Blackboard, and open source infrastructure to provide
efficient hosting services, professional development communities, student services
through regional coordinator outreach, grant programs, and an annual conference
are among the services established by OLN to meet this mission.
To provide this basket of services requires a lot of participation from Ohio
institutions and substantial facilitation from Columbus-based OLN. And, while
Columbus is located almost in the exact center of the state, many of the member
institutions are at least two hours away by car. Faced with the need to meet
regularly to implement its many projects, and challenged by the busy schedules
and increasingly costly travel of the multiple committee members, we’ve
begun to “walk the walk” of eLearning by convening an increasing
number of our meetings as electronic conferences. For more than two years, we
have used Elluminate (www.elluminate.com),
within our broader Learning Times online community, as our online meeting platform.
We have licensed two Elluminate “rooms” in which to hold our electronic
meetings. One is a “pop-in” room that can accommodate five users
simultaneously and the other is able to convene a meeting of 25 participants.
Both rooms provide a full complement of shared services including: application
sharing, audio and video, a text-based chat that can be channeled as private
or group communication, Web tours, multimedia playback, an interactive whiteboard,
breakout rooms for sub-committee work, several decision making tools such as
polling and quizzing to help the group select among competing proposals, and
the ability to record, archive, and playback sessions.
Elluminate works best under the control of a trained moderator. I first worked
with the Elluminate staff in 2002 to develop a set of skills and have practiced
them in more than 250 meetings since. Prior to any online meeting, I ask all
members if they are comfortable with the technology and strongly suggest private
training sessions for first timers. This training usually requires about 10
minutes to make most users feel at ease in the Elluminate environment and able
to participate.
Like any meeting, online meetings are most successful when there is a pre-existing
agenda, an experienced moderator, and participants with knowledge of how to
participate. I make it a point to send out the agenda at least two weeks before
the meeting, and include documents, PowerPoints, and Websites we’ll be
discussing in the meeting. In addition, I paste all main agenda points on the
Elluminate whiteboard. As we move through the agenda, all participants can and
do add their comments (in different colored text) to the whiteboard. After the
meeting, I save the whiteboard notes as the meeting minutes and post them to
the committee’s shared file space in our Learning Times community.
While we have generally been very happy with Elluminate, we have found it especially
well suited for some types of meetings and not as well suited for others. When
there is a clearly defined agenda, when people participate sequentially, and
when materials are available that can be shared in the common whiteboard, the
Elluminate environment serves extremely well. Because of the simplex nature
of the audio (only one speaker at a time), brainstorming sessions have been
less successful. We continue to work on passing the role of moderator among
group members, since moderator style greatly influences the nature, conduct,
and perhaps outcomes of the meeting. Moderating requires an additional set of
skills than simply participating, but this is no different than in traditional
face-face meetings.
As one example of the kind of work we conduct, two-thirds of OLN’s Emerging
Technologies Committee meetings are conducted via Elluminate. The committee
consists of 15 members and we all convene at the appointed time for a three
hour session. One of the functions of the Emerging Technology Committee is to
identify the kinds of technologies that we would like to explore as a state
during the coming year to continually improve our methods for supporting and
delivering online education. Conferencing technologies, and in particular Elluminate,
is one technology the committee has identified to explore. Toward that end,
I support experiments at our various member schools that have needs for such
software. For example, Ohio State University is holding a conference
on electronic democracy and citizen participation and Elluminate will serve
as the platform for planners, policy makers, and other conference attendees
to meet and discuss community issues and broadening citizen participation.
OLN is also using Elluminate for a free webinar series highlighting Ohio experts’
use of and successful practices with student learning and educational technologies.
And the Ohio Board of Regents has more than 40 faculty committees using Elluminate
to define transfer assurance guides in approximately 44 different subject areas,
so course credit can be more easily transferred between Ohio institutions. Projects
such as these help OLN fulfill its mission to assist its members and at the
same time trains college and university staff so they can participate in future
OLN electronic meetings.
In closing, I would like to note OLN is highly supportive of the inclusive
features that Elluminate is rolling out in its most recent (6.5) release. In
support of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Elluminate Live! 6.5 will
offer such features as: multiple closed captioning streams, increased font sizes
for text messages, high contrast settings, automatic detection of platform color
schemes, and compliance with screen reader products (e.g., JAWS and Narrator).
These enhancements will allow broader representation in our electronic community
sharing and decision making, as well as encourage accessible online learning
offerings for Ohioans.
Cable Green ([email protected]) is Director of Technology for the Ohio Learning
Network.
