Elluminate Live - an Online Meeting Place

Elluminate Live is one of the leading synchronous e-learning and web conferencing technologies available to the University of Cincinnati community. Synchronous e-learning refers to concurrent and collaborative online learning led by an instructor in real time to students in different locations. Web conferencing is online meeting or collaborating by two or more geographically dispersed participants. Elluminate Live's large variety of tools facilitate these virtual face-to-face experiences.

The University of Cincinnati participates in educational initiatives at the national and global levels. The demographics and learning needs of students at institutions of higher education change rapidly. These factors have increased the demand for hybrid and distance learning courses at UC, and Elluminate Live is playing an important role.

Since implementing this technology two years ago, the university has steadily increased its use for virtual classrooms, virtual office hours, online class presentations, web meetings, team work, and guest speakers. UC can also use the technology for ad hoc meetings and online tutoring and mentoring.
 
Last summer, make it easier for users to set up Elluminate Live meetings, UCit implemented a Blackboard building block to integrate the two systems. Blackboard course instructors and organization leaders can now set up their meetings from the Elluminate Live link under the Communication menu item of any course or organization. The current site license agreement provides 50 concurrent seats which users can reserve on a weekly or daily basis for the quarter. A UCit server hosts Elluminate Live, so UCit can quickly resolve technical problems.
 
UCit will upgrade Elluminate Live to its latest version, 8, for winter 2008 quarter. Elluminate Live is cross platform compatible, and you can access it either directly or through Blackboard from any browser with a Java plug-in.

Elliminate Live comes with a variety of tools that an instructor can blend for a variety of teaching practices. Participants can communicate via chat, audio, or video. Users can share documents, presentations, desktops, web sites, and multimedia via white board, application sharing, web push or tour, file transfer, and media exchange tools. Interactively poll or quiz. Use drawing tools. Engage in group activity via breakout sessions. Record breakout sessions. You can access recordings through Blackboard courses, if you like. ADA 508c compliant , this technology supports accessibility.
 
For faculty training and support for Elluminate, please contact the Instructional and Research Computing group at elluminate@uc.edu. You may access product documentation for both instructors and students, or "moderators and participants," at http://elluminate.com/support/training.  

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