Our objective with the social software we are using is to demonstrate tools and learn lessons that can be applied directly to GDLN projects. We intend to use inexpensive (usually free) tools that are powerful and widely available for all that we do. Moreover, we want these tools to be usable by non-tech folks. As the facilitators, we at Forum One could get help from our excellent technology or user experience teams to craft specialized services, but most GDLN affiliates don’t have these kinds of resources readily available.
Thus, for the web conferencing portion of the course, we had intended to use an inexpensive desktop sharing tool and a separate voice-over-IP (VoIP) tool that supported voice conferencing (we figured we would need 30 simultaneous users). We had chosen ReadyTalk as our desktop-sharing tool because we have been using it in-house and are pretty comfortable with it and it is pretty affordable. ReadyTalk supports telephone conference calls but doesn’t offer a VoIP option.
We then set out to find a good, cheap, VoIP voice conferencing tool but didn’t find one. I was most hopeful for Skype’s SkypeCast service. It is supposed to support up to 100 simultaneous users and is available for free. While it gets some good reviews, the sound quality in our tests was poor. Moreover, it looks like there may be some bugs that are yet to be worked out (Skype is good about keeping users up-to-date on issues).
We liked the VoIP functionality of Elluminate better than other tools we tried. It supports multiple connections and up to 4 simultaneous speakers (not that having 4 people speak at the same time on a web conference is a good idea!) and quality was good.
The down sides of Elluminate include that it requires Java and a large download for participants and is reasonably complex. A number of participants had a hard time logging in. Of course, the flip side of “complex” is “powerful” — it supports a number of interesting interactivity options including polling, chat, graphing, whiteboarding, screen sharing, multiple moderators, etc.
Given all this, I like the product. I just wish there was a cheaper price structure for international use (hint, hint!).
