ictonline

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Apologies for exclusion of students from Elluminate

I think I can answer a few issues that arose on Wednesday night now I have spent a bit of time yesterday trying to get my head around the issue of the University of Melbourne purchasing just a 10 seat virtual classroom for the Elluminate software environment.

As those who were in the chat know I asked everyone to migrate to Elluminate from the Skype text based chat and then we found that as with the previous week some students could not get in. This week we discovered that it occurs after we got to ten students in the Elluminate area for the Uni.

What i did not realise is that the uni has only bought a 10 person licence from Elluminate. The reason for this are "elluminating" As expected they relate to economics and demand and the financial expectations around online as an area of interest at the University.

The detail of the Elluinate environment and the way it is licenced are important issues for us anyway if we see ourselves as those who are learning about Online Education and Training in this subject.  So it is on task look at and discuss and comment on this issue here in the subject blog.

Despite or perhaps because of my enthusiasm for the environment when I was told I would finally have access to the environment for teaching this semester I failed to ask or just assumed or did not hear that the environment licence was for 10 ten person interaction. Possibly my fault but as the uni will not allow a subject to run with less than 15 initial enrolments ten  is a strange number to use as a base line minimum.

The number ten is however significant, as could be expected, based on what is considered to be the extremely expensive licencing criteria that Elluminate imposes.  Part of that criteria is the need to understand that an Elluminate licence is a rental cost and not really a purchase.

If you consider that the 10 seat virtual room is  only rented for one year and costs $8000.00 there is a very strong disincentive and difficult justification on an economic basis for such expense at the university for an unproven and not widely called for application.

IF you think about it a $16000.00 justification on the same basis for a 20 seat installation then it would be even more difficult to get approved for funding.

This has relevance for students studying how to implement online teaching and learning in their own institutions. Learning about Elluminate is therefore "elluminating" for financial as well as educational reasons.

Is it for example justified to force students to gain experience in using such an expensive tool especially if it is unlikely to become widely deployed by those student in their own circumstances because of the economics of educational institution in this country. This issue of expense is also of relevance to the way that online learning is perceived by organisations generally as one where savings or costs are relatively small by comparison to actual real not virtual building and power cost of providing f2f teaching spaces.

In organisations generally the perception (perhaps falsely held or promoted) is that online learning is cost effective relative to face to face and education in general in Australia is considered to be a money maker by private schools and even governments.

The view that online training is relatively inexpensive is also widely held in industry especially when they take into consideration the down time of training and the expense of getting staff to one location in terms of air fare and accommodation costs for a couple of days of PD (that those trained will in most circumstances never follow up on) .

You might dispute that there is some truth to the idea that online could possibly be cost effective, You can make a comment on the end of the post here on this if you like.

The circumstances here at the University are that because of the cost Elluminate - it is not yet being actively pursued here at Melbourne.  A smallish badly funded trial was all that was approved and there is no likelihood this year that extra funding or double the amount already allocated will occur.

You might be surprised to hear that I think this is good because despite some of the obvious advantages that Elluminate has - alternatives will now need to be investigated by this subject.

Already Matt and now with the support of Ben has found an alternative called VisIQ that they cannot really test until a few of us get in there and see how it goes. Those alternatives are what we will pursue alongside a devious way of accessing Elluminate that we will also fall back on.