Collaboration & Learning Environments


Video Conferencing and Other Collaboration Tools

Workstream Summary

Expected Outcomes

• Students in one University able to participate in live teaching sessions at other Universities in the Alliance using high quality video conferencing
• Lectures, external seminars and other public events to be recorded and subsequently viewed
• Audio-visual feeds from laboratories, operating theatres, scientific equipment and other restricted-access environments to be used within teaching sessions on any of the Alliance sites
• Licences obtained for collaboration tools to be used across the Alliance

Benefits

• Students able to participate in modules run from a different University without having to travel to that site
• Lecturers able to interact with groups of students at several sites simultaneously without having to travel
• High quality support for students undertaking courses delivered across the three Universities of the Alliance via enhancements to existing helpdesk services
• Staff, students and external partners able to collaborate effectively without always having to meet face to face

Completed Projects

• Innovation award project on Video Conferencing Usability, creating guidance and tips for teachers

• Staff development workshops for Biomedical Science staff held at each of the three institutions

• Creation of the SWan Videoconferencing community on the One Community site for sharing resources related to delivery of lectures by video conferencing. Resources have been collected from the SWan Video Conferencing Usability project and from Exeter and Cumbria Universities. These resources were used to inform the staff development workshops and the creation of procedures and checklists specific to the delivery of SWan BMS Modules.

See: http://one.swlacademicnetwork.ac.uk/swanvc/

• Video conferencing and recording of the first semester’s SWan BMS Modules, making the recordings available through the relevant Virtual Learning Environment (Blackboard at Kingston or Moodle at SGUL and RHUL)

Current Activities

• Project team for large-scale video conferencing in place to:
a) Video conferencing and recording of the second semester's SWan BMS modules

b) Conduct technical tests of video conferencing and streaming media services across the three Universities, including use to support streaming and recording of occasional external seminars
c) Record SWan BMS lectures and provide links to the recordings on the relevant Virtual Learning Environment (Blackboard at Kingston or Moodle at SGUL and RHUL)
• Innovation award project o Miscroscopy Research and PhD co-supervision: exploring how online environments, including One Community and NEFSIS, may be used by research teams to support collaboration across multiple sites.
• Innovation award project on Medical Imaging, to enable annotated MRI and CT scan images to be shared more easily among research collaborators at different sites
• Support for NEFSIS desktop web conferencing for staff meetings avoiding travel
• Exploration of how the Wimba Collaboration Suite, including Wimba Pronto, can be used to help collaboration, e.g. between universities and employers – see http://one.swlacademicnetwork.ac.uk/wimba.