Elluminate Pilot Project

Projects - Current

Projects - Completed

Background

UWS is sponsoring a pilot project for the Elluminate Web Conferencing System through Fall semester 2010. The goal of this pilot is to explore the capabilities of Elluminate System as a synchronous tool to complement the online learning needs at UW. The direct integration of Elluminate with D2L offers advantages in easy user management and access by faculty and students.

The Project

The planned pilot period was planned for spring 2010 semester with ~50 faculty and ~1000 students. This limited pilot project was made possible by the free user license offer by the vendors involved. The Learn@UW utility offered support and coordination of the usage report with ICS at UW-Extension. The pilot incurred no license cost to the participating campuses. The campuses sought faculty who would be good candidates to use this tool in their classes in a variety of ways that can help with collection of effective evaluation data:

  • Faculty who teach in face-to-face courses, hybrid or blended, or totally online courses
  • Faculty who are experienced in Adobe Connect (or other synchronous tools) as well as faculty who are new to the tool, but have the needs for real time online communication in their courses
  • Faculty who will use the tool for a variety of pedagogical purposes:
    • virtual office hours,
    • student advising, mentoring, or tutoring,
    • remote guest presentations,
    • small group work,
    • live student presentations, lecture delivery

Campus Participation

12 campuses participated in the pilot with ~45 faculty, 50 courses and >1,000 student representing a wide variety of disciplines in f2f, blended and online courses. Some were experienced with Adobe Connect but majority were first time users in web conferencing systems.  A feedback survey was conducted to participants at the end of the Spring semester. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Next Step

The Pilot has been extended for the Fall 2010 semester, with unlimited use for all UW campuses interested. The Office of Learning Technology Development will investigate actively in acquiring a web conferencing system more widely available to instructional use during the Fall 2010 semester as well.