What does it do?

Web comferencing allows staff and students to meet in real time in a virtual (online) space. During a session, participants can use text based chat, audio chat and/or video to communicate. An electronic whiteboard allows for the sharing and live annotation of PowerPoint presentations (though video and animations embedded in PowerPoint presentations will not work). When participant internet connections are reliable, live presentations of your computer screen can also be shared, allowing you to show students through a website, demonstrate the use of an Excel spreadsheet, annotate a Word document and so forth. The moderator of a session has  some control over what the participants of the room are able to do with the available tools. The moderator is also able to record all or part of a session for later viewing. You can even invite an external presenter to join the session, even if they are not a UTAS staff member or student.

At present, the Web conferencing tool used at UTAS is Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (often referred to as Ultra). Ultra works on Mac and PC, and mobile devices (when the free Blackboard Student app is installed). Skype for Business is sometimes  used, but this tends to be reserved for meetings between UTAS staff.

Useful terminology

• Room: an online space dedicated to your unit. The room is available anytime whilst the unit is active. Many staff refer to this room as a web room to help students differentiate between synchronous face-to-face activity, and synchronous online activity.
• Session: the term used to describe the activity that occurs in a room when the moderator and participants meet together. By default, your unit will have its own room. You can pre-book sessions to take place between set dates and times. These occur in addition to your unit room.
• Moderator: the person/people in control of permissions and functionality in the room. Moderators can remove other participants, control which tools participants can use, change the role of participants (to presenters or moderators), share materials via the room whiteboard and start a recording.
• Presenter: has the same permissions as a  participant, but has the ability to share items on the room whiteboard.
• Participant: any person participating in a session that does not have the permissions of a moderator or a presenter.

What is Web conferencing best for?

• Real-time meetings between distributed learners.
• Virtual tutorials, workshops or lectures where interactivity between participants and/or moderator is desired. If a session is more for ‘show and tell’, a video recording is often more suitable than a web conference.
• Student meeting rooms to help support collaborative group work between students.
• Drop-in information sessions, or Q&A sessions about forthcoming assessment tasks.
• Guest lectures, where you would like the guest presenter to respond to student queries (these can be easier to run in a web conferencing setting than in a physical lecture theatre).

Capabilities and tools

A summary of the tools available in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is available here (opens in new window).