Taking place in several locations simultaneously:

• Charterhouse Square: G.06 Rotblatt Building
• Mile End: The E-Learning Studio, Scape 0.09
• …and online! (joining instructions)

The E-Learning Unit will be hosting an E-Learning Hour from 1-2pm on Wednesday May 8th, showcasing Blackboard Collaborate, an online classroom tool available to all staff at QMUL. You can attend this session in person at Charterhouse Square or Mile End, or you can join in online.

Blackboard Collaborate is designed specifically for education and provides online classroom functionality. It is fully integrated with QMplus meaning that all you have to do to make use of it is to add a Collaborate activity to your area on QMplus and you have an online classroom for you and your students. Some features that Blackboard Collaborate provides are:

• Video and audio – all attendees can share their video and audio with moderators having controls over who can share when.
• Shared whiteboard – available for everyone to write on, great for collaborative activities.
• Chat window – text based communication between session moderators and participants, or between individuals.
• Screen and file sharing – moderators and participants can upload files to share or can share their own computer screens.
• Breakout rooms – break participants up into group rooms for discussion and then bring everyone back together to feed back.
• Session recording – you can record all or part of your session and the link to the recording appears automatically on QMplus.
• Guest access – people without QMplus logins can still participate in sessions via a guest link option.
• Assign grades and feedback for the session – your Collaborate session can appear in your QMplus gradebook and you can assign a grade and feedback for the session.

In this session we’ll not only demonstrate lots of the features of Blackboard Collaborate but we’ll also be facilitating some discussion around how best to teach with this type of technology.

The session will be hosted in Blackboard Collaborate itself so you’ll be able to join in remotely. However, if you’d prefer to join in in person there will be sessions in Charterhouse Square and the E-Learning Studio in the Scape building on the Mile End campus. If you’d like to attend in person, come along to one of these locations at 1pm. A member of the E-Learning Unit will be there running the session.

Joining in online

If you can’t attend either of the locations in person, you can join in online. To do this you will need to have headphones…or speakers and tolerant work colleagues. A microphone and webcam would also be useful but they aren’t necessary.

To join the session:

• Go to the E-Learning Hour area on QMplus and enrol yourself on to it (you can do this anytime before the session…now for instance!)
• Go to the section titled “May 8th : Using Blackboard Collaborate for your online classroom. Click on the “Blackboard Collaborate Online Classroom” link to join the session. The session will begin at 1pm however you will be able to join online from 12.45 to test your setup.