Sychronous e-Learning
I’m doing some research into the various synchronous e-learning tools around.
Here’s a couple I’ve looked at so far:
Netmeeting: Free tool that comes with windows - click start, run, type in ‘conf’ to run. You can chat, have video, share the desktop and have a virtual whiteboard. It’s pretty good but I have had problems setting up the audio and connecting to a netmeeting server.
Breeze (Acrobat Connect Professional): Flash based web-conferencing tool. You can join a meeting by simply opening up the webpage where the meeting is being held. Has video-conferencing, chat, VOIP, and everything you’d need to synchronous learning. Subscriptions are fairly expensive though.
Web-Ex: Similar to Breeze but uses a proprietary plug-in which you have to download before joining the meeting. Again subscriptions are fairly expensive.
I’ll be trying out several more applications over the next few weeks. If anyone has any experience with synchronous e-learning tools, please post any suggestions in the comments.
In particular, I’m looking for opinions about Elluminate, Interwise, Live Meeting and Centra.
