Some teaching spaces at Flinders are now enabled for web conferencing. The web conferencing system used for teaching at Flinders is Collaborate.

What does this mean?
You can now conduct Collaborate sessions in enabled rooms on campus. This means that you can bring off-campus participants (students, guest lecturers) into the physical classroom, and have off-campus participants attend your classes synchronously.

All in-room microphones, including Catchboxes and lapel microphones, will work with both lecture recordings and Collaborate sessions. You can run a Collaborate session and a lecture recording simultaneously. Most rooms also have microphones built into the ceiling to help pick up audio from participants in your sessions so they can be heard by online students.

Can someone help me?
For assistance scheduling your Collaborate session and for advice on how to use Collaborate in your teaching, speak with your local eLearning team. There will be placards in enabled rooms to show you how to run your Collaborate session online and you can also seek assistance from the AV team for in-room support on the day (12345, option 1). You can also run practice sessions with colleagues to test and gain confidence before running a live session with students. Your local eLearning team can help get you started if you’re having problems.

Tips for using Collaborate
There are a number of ways Collaborate can be used:

1. One on one – for consultation sessions or vivas with your online students
2. One to many – providing information or delivering a lecture to a group of students (could include student presentations)
3. Many to many – a collaborative session where all participants are contributing to the conversation (eg. a workshop or tutorial)

Remember that you don’t need to be on campus to use Collaborate. You can also run a Collaborate session remotely, however if the session is also occurring in a physical teaching space you will need to make sure someone is in the room to facilitate and ensure the technology is working for all participants.

When running a Collaborate session it is important to think about how your participants will be interacting. In a ‘one to many’ session:

• Will you take questions throughout the presentation, or at the end?
• Will questions be via audio or text?
• Will you be monitoring the text chat stream – or perhaps you will have someone helping you with this?

In a ‘many to many’ session:

• will interaction take place via audio or text?
• Will you ask participants to have their video on so that all participants can see each other?

If you have both online participants and in-room participants you also need to think about how you will make sure that online participants are included and remain engaged with the activities in the room.

Your local eLearning team can help you work through these decisions to ensure that you are setting participant expectations up front and ensuring that your online students are included and engaged.