The Open University Selects Elluminate Live!^® for Synchronous Collaboration

By Niall Sclater, Director, Virtual Learning Environment Programme

The Open University needed to replace an internally developed legacy synchronous collaboration system called Lyceum. The original users of this system were primarily our languages students, and it was built for the Windows platform. In addition to audio conferencing facilities, we also made substantial use of the shared whiteboard toolset and the ability to chat and check progress in parallel to the main discussions. The management of the virtual space also required very flexible uses of breakout rooms and movement between them.

The Selection Process

Our selection process involved a procurement exercise where 14 applicants completed pre-qualification questionnaires, from which 3 shortlisted vendors were invited to tender proposals. We then conducted technical, accessibility, and cross-faculty stakeholder and user evaluations covering a range of essential and desirable criteria.

Elluminate Live! scored most highly on user features and functionality and was also the strongest on technical requirements. The Elluminate products meet all the mandatory requirements stated in the invitation to tender and provide a stronger range of features suited to the teaching and learning needs of the OU.

Planned Applications

In addition to the providing the product to the existing users of Lyceum, we also intend to offer Elluminate Live! to all courses within the OU by integrating with the OU's chosen open-source learning management system, Moodle. The Elluminate toolset also offers advantages for tutors and in the course creation process that our course teams are keen to leverage.

Anticipated Benefits

The Elluminate tools have the potential to alter dramatically the learning experience for our nearly 200,000 distance learners, bringing them closer to each other and to their tutors. I’m looking forward to a productive partnership with Elluminate, ensuring that our extensive experience of distance learning can be used to further enhance a great set of tools for teaching and learning.

We hope that Elluminate will, by virtue of being available to all, become a common point for students to collaborate more effectively from many disparate locations within the UK and worldwide. The OU is keen to support multiplatform access to tools and services through adoption of consolidated web-based technologies, and Elluminate's response to this has been extremely encouraging, especially with respect to our Mac user community.

About The Open University

Founded in 1969, The Open University is the UK’s largest university and the country’s only university dedicated to distance learning. The OU is open to people, places, methods and ideas, promoting educational opportunity and social justice by providing high-quality university education to those who might otherwise be excluded. Today more than 180,000 students are interacting with the OU online from home. Approximately 70 percent of the university’s 150,000 undergraduate students are employed full-time, 10,000 students have disabilities, and more than 25.000 students live outside the UK. For more information, visit www.open.ac.uk.