A while back I participated in an online audio conference as part of the open-education group that was facilitated using vClass by Elluminate. I had used the software before and each time been very impressed with how well it works. But given that the focus of this group is ‘open source’ as it applies to educational content, someone very astutely commented that we should be looking for an open source alternative to vClass to support this group’s work. This comment really stuck with me, also because a number of institutions in B.C. have been investigating possible solutions to facilitate synchronous online classes, and ending up with some fairly pricey solutions.
So I spent some time last week scouring the net for some additional options, as I hadn’t been aware of many off the top of my head. Here is the short list of other possibilities I came up with:
- Lyceum – voice over IP w/ whiteboard from Open University in U.K. (but doesn’t appear to be have been released publicly)
- Collaborative Computing Frameworks for Natural Sciences Research (last release August 2000)
- Collaborative Virtual Workspace (last news item was posted in 2001!)
- Speak Freely for Unix, Speak Freely for Windows (strictly voice)
None of these seem very viable, either because the software is no longer being developed or has never been widely released. I think the Coccinella package that George Siemens posted on today sounds interesting too, but it wasn’t clear to me that it supported voice-chat in addition to text chat and whiteboard. I’d be very interested to hear of other open source packages if people know about them. – SWL