Elluminate – Real time interaction in Moodle

For those of you who haven’t done much exploring in Moodle recently, note that you can now add an Elluminate activity to any weekly or topical center block in Moodle. You can set the dates of availability and restrict user access to a single student or make it available to the entire class.

Like the other human presence tools in Moodle, you can’t set up an Elluminate activity as a graded one except for attendance. When you set up the activity you can set a point value and later when you mark attendance after the event the point value goes into the gradebook. Note, students either get all the points or no points for the activity. An alternate approach is to not set a point value in the activity and enter a score manually in the gradebook for the activity.

Elluminate has most features that other virtual classroom applications have.

• You can upload any type of file, share it, use a highlighter on it, and save the results as an image file for later review.
• You can also upload a powerpoint presentation to give a lecture.
• You can link to websites, chat with students, and share applications or windows on your desktop.
• All of the presentation and interaction including your voice can recorded and archived for later viewing.

Elluminate works well with most browsers I’ve checked except it requires a java applet to run and you must accept a web certificate since our SBCC instance of Elluminate runs on one of their servers.

If you’re interested in experimenting with Elluminate OR you want to review their online archived tutorials, you can access them for free at http://elluminate.com/support/training/index.jsp. Select the link for the recorded moderator training for version 8. The Elluminate folks also sometimes do free web demos if you want a real-time demonstration.

Some typical educational uses of Elluminate include:

• application training
• question and answer review
• e-lectures
• small-group meetings

As I find more specific uses of Elluminate in instruction,  I’ll post them here as case-studies for our campus faculty.

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