The Meeting Access Dilemma

At this point, I feel confident making the statement that most companies know how to use webconferencing as a vehicle for delivering remote training. The challenge arises when these same companies try to use webconferencing within their learning management systems as a piece of content. No matter which service they are using for webconferencing and no matter which learning management system they have deployed, the same problems tend to rear their ugly heads - managing users, syncing report data and establishing access times for the meeting room.

Envisiontel recently solved this problem for their customers by integrating Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional with Moodle. Envisiontel has been providing elearning solutions using Moodle for several years. It is just in the past few months that we officially launched this as a formal solution.

The system is quite elegant in the way that it manages users across both databases and keeps student grades and activity reports in sync. It's one of our newest enhancements that really makes the system stand out, which is the manner in which it manages actual access to meeting times. It can be a real drag always updating meeting room url's as well as start and end times. This usually means a lot of switching back and forth for the course instructor between multiple systems.

We took a different approach to this dilemma and decided to use the activity editor in Moodle as a way of turning meeting room access on and off. Our new method allows instructors to keep all the basic meeting parameters unchanged on the Adobe Connect server. They simply change the start and stop time for the meeting activity within Moodle and the access link to the meeting room appears or disappears according to those parameters.

This screenshot shows a meeting activity in Moodle where the student is attempting to access the meeting room after the activity has closed. There is no link and the students receive a message indicating that the activity is closed.









Next, we see the edit screen for this activity in Moodle. In the timing section, instructors can choose a time for the activity to be opened and then a time for it to be closed. Not all content on an Adobe Connect server is a live meeting, so this could also be used to set expiration times for content that may become invalid over time for one reason or another.



Finally, after the meeting activity has been updated, students see the actual link for joining the live meeting activity as well as a message indicating the date and time that the activity will close. Using this method allows instructors to use the same meeting room over and over again for different presentations but they can control when students access the room using simple settings within Moodle.





View this recent two minute drill from Envisiontel to see this application in action.


About Envisiontel
Since 2003 Envisiontel has been building multimedia content for elearning. Today, the company offers a full range of products and services that help companies translate their traditional classroom materials into compelling remote learning libraries. Envisiontel is an Adobe Solution partner and reseller, which allows them to mix the power of traditional boxed software with the flexibility of custom services to create tailored training solutions that fit customer’s business needs and deliver on ROI expectations.