proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING

For the audience site, the camera should be in such a position as to give a good pan of the room.
Then there should be a method for easily getting information such as questions to the presenter. This may
be a microphone, although other solutions such as a wireless keyboard, and chat dialogue may also be
useful.
The Audience Site
In preparing for the presentation there are a number of considerations to be made about the
physical configuration of the audience site. Most everything revolves around the screen. People need to be
close enough and the projection large enough that they can see everything comfortably. Some other issues
regard placement of the camera, and how the audience will actually interact with the presenter. Note as that
the presenter will be speaking to an audience which they may or may not hear or see at times, thus having
an interlocutor onsite can greatly smooth the presentation for errors from technology and calibration.
A choice must be made as to whether the presenter will be at all times on the screen, or if other
applications will be allowed to cover them over. Some people prefer to be able to see who is speaking at all
times. Since the desktop area at the host sight will probably be projected for the audience, one must
consider what will be on the desktop. If more than one application will be used, it may be arranged that all
of the applications are on the screen at one time. For some, the video feed would be one of the applications
that they would want to have present throughout the presentation.
However, having the presenter on the screen the whole time raises an important question of where,
and likewise how big. Generally, one of the big struggles for the audience site will finding a balance for
what should be on the screen and where?
Resolution
The video feed has another element which relates to what the audience sees. There are two places
where resolution can be set. One is on the camera, and the other is on the screen. Both affect the size of
how the speaker finally appears on the screen. If the resolution is lower on the screen, the speaker will
appear larger, however, it also means that there will be less room for showing other applications. However,
if the screen resolution is higher, the speaker will be smaller, or will be forced to use a higher broadcast
resolution on their side. Using a higher broadcast resolution will mean that the speaker needs more
bandwidth, and has a greater chance of becoming choppy due to other network traffic. Note that in the case
of using Skype or Illuminate since the applications have to work with a server to traverse the firewall,
traffic problems can be elsewhere in the internet and still affect the quality of the video feed.
Likewise, it is also important to remember that on the remote side, the presenter may also have
limits imposed by desktop realestate. In the presentation, the remote laptop had a resolution of 1024x768,
which meant that one could not see the full application when controlling Word or the like from Eluminate.
Application Focus
Depending on how remote control is given to the presenter, the changing of applications may lead
to issues of focus. The altering of window focus while application sharing caused the video window to be
hidden on multiple occasions - on top of regaining focus on the video window, the host was duty bound to
move the presenter around the screen several times for appropriate screen real-estate.
Interruptions by the host
Inter-presentation communication or more specifically interjections by the host should be agreed
upon before the presentation. Two points to consider, first the person making the presentation may have
trouble continuing, as it can be much more difficult to recover remotely when interrupted. Equally, the
presenter may not be aware of audience reactions that the host can see. Beyond these two points, a third
rather technical issue also appears at the perimeter. Basically, some types of connections may not be fullduplex,
meaning that simultaneous transmissions from the host and presenter can cancel one another; at
which point neither person gets the message. The latter point is probably the one that becomes most
pertinent when the system is under strenuous load such as the case of running Eluminate with Skype via a
Wifi connection.
Conference proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING overcome barriers of Life-Long learning?” 119