rSmart Contributes Live Virtual Classroom Tool

 

rSmart is happy to announce the contribution of its Live Virtual Classroom tool (LVC) to the Sakai community. For more information see this link and the following information.

About the Tool

The Live Virtual Classroom tool was originally developed in 2006 as part of an engagement between Mesa Community College (MCC) and rSmart. At that time, the tool integrated Sakai 2.2 with on-premise deployments of Elluminate Live! MCC has since agreed to contribute the code to the community, and rSmart has ported it forward to 2.6.

In its current form, LVC works only with Elluminate Live!. The front end is sufficiently separated from the back end, however, to permit integration with other webcasting tools by simply swapping out the service-level implementation. To extend the tool's functionality, developers need only extend VirtualClassroomServiceImpl and re-implement the communication layer with the desired external webcasting tool. rSmart plans to use this approach to provide support for Adobe Connect in the near future.

Live Virtual Classroom is the second tool of its type to be contributed to Sakai. Last year, Unicon contributed functionality that works with Elluminate's hosted offering (information available here). Because the rSmart tool supports on-premise deployments of Elluminate Live!, institutions using Sakai and Elluminate Live! can now choose the integration tool that is appropriate for their situation.

Features and Screenshots

The Live Virtual Classroom tool enables users to perform these activities:

  • Schedule one-time or reccurring meetings from within Sakai.
  • Edit and delete scheduled meetings and recordings.
  • Automatically create moderator users in Elluminate.
  • Join active meetings from within the Sakai tool.
  • Watch recordings of past meeting from within the Sakai tool.
  • Filter and sort lists of meetings and recordings from within the Sakai tool.
  • Ping the Elluminate server (allows users to check configuration and status between the servers).

Note: Sakai maintains a list of meetings associated with different Sakai sites, so users of different sites see only their site's meetings.

Video Demonstration

A screencast demo of LVC is available here.