Office of Academic Technology :: Spring Arbor University

If you are interested in hosting live lectures, webinars, or discussion groups for your students online, you’ll want to keep reading.

Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) is a web-based collaboration tool that allows you to host webinars or meetings with your students at your own convenience.  As I mentioned in our last post, the main changes you can expect with Collaborate are the addition of more seats per session, methods for scheduling sessions, and the process of inviting students to new sessions.  Let me break down each update more specifically.

Additional Seats

Collaborate offers up to 100 seats per session.  You can invite students, guest lecturers, colleagues, or anyone else.  As a moderator you have the ability to invite anyone you like, up to 100 people per session.

Scheduling Sessions

One of the main differences between Elluminate and Collaborate is that Collaborate is not built into Blackboard in the same way that its predecessor was.  In fact, it’s not built in at all.  To schedule sessions you will now need to use the Collaborate portal.

To schedule new Collaborate sessions, go to the login page and enter your collaborate username and password.

Once you’re in, click “schedule a meeting” along the left side navigation.  When the page loads, the portal should look very similar to the old one and will allow you to schedule sessions by adding a session name, date, and time.  Once you have entered your information, click “Create the Session.” (image left)

 Inviting Participants

Since Collaborate is now a web-based service (SAS), you will not be able to invite participants through your Blackboard course shell.  Instead you should email participants directly, and include the specific invitation URL provided when you created the session (image below).

Conclusion

For instructions on other commonly used features of Collaborate, Please Login to read the rest of this content using your SAU username and password. Why login?