Blackboard Collaborate Only Works Half the Time

This week I am attending about six video conferences a day. Most are with Zoom, a few with Blackboard Collaborate. About nine out ten of the Zoom meetings work, but only about half the BB ones. Even when it does connect, there are problems with sound dropouts using BB. Also BB only seems to work for me with screen-sharing and audio. When it does work, BB is reasonably efficient requiring 70 Kbps download and 50 Kbps upload, which is better than Zoom without video. But I can't get video to work with BB at all. It may be that my wireless link is too slow, or too high latency, but whatever reason BB is not a viable product for me.

Reflections on Peer Review of Teaching for Promotion

Greetings from Canberra, where Professor Geoff Crisp, UC DVC&VP-A,  is speaking on Reflections on Peer Review of Teaching for Promotion. This has been organized by Pamela Roberts, the ACT HERDSA Chair.

Professor Crisp discussed the different forms of peer review (summative and formative) and their different uses (for promotion/awards, or for improving teaching quality).They then described the UNSW Summative Peer Review of Teaching. The UNSW website is very useful, having a description of the process and a set of downloadable templates.

The webinar is via Blackboard Collaborate, due to the the  COVID-19 Coronavirus. I could not get it to work with Firefox, but it is working with Chrome. However, the audio quality is much poorer than with Zoom, when using the same connection speed (and this is with my not transmitting any video or audio, just receiving). With Blackboard the audio would break up, stop and then proceed at higher than normal speed. A positive point was that the text chat form worked much better than Zoom. 

Free open source alternatives to Zoom for Videoconferences

I spent much of the week in Zoom based video conferences, only one of which did not work. This is remarkable, given how heavily Zoom is being used due to the COVID-19 Coronavirus. In contrast, I had considerable difficulty with Blackboard Collaborate. Collaborate seems to be less able to cope with my 1 mbps broadband connection than when I used it at 28.8 kbps dial-up speed in 2011. 

There are also some open source video conference products. Hamza Mu has detailed 15 of them in "Top 15 Open source Video conference and Team Communication Solutions for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and Phones (Medevel.com, 30 Mar 2019). The only one of these open source products I have used is BigBlueButton, which is commonly teamed with the Moodle learning management system. However, Apache OpenMeetings looks interesting.

However, these video conference tools have not changed much, from the user's point of video, for decades. The quality of the video has improved, but that is about all, and that is about the least important aspect of a video conference. These events should really be called audio conferences with a shared screen and optional video.

Webinar Via Blackboard Connect on Mobile Device

Today I took part in the ACEN Webinar  on 'WIL in STEM Disciplines' using the Blackboard Collaborate App for Android on a smart phone. Set to "slow" connection, this used 1 kilobyte per second. The slides were readable on-screen and I could type text replies. However, I could not work out how to answer multiple choice quiz questions or type text on the shared screen. Also it was difficult to search for something in a web browser and then paste it to the webinar. With a headset it was easy to walk around while taking part in the webinar. The downside of this that those around me did not realize I was taking part in an event and wanted to talk to me.