Webinar: Tools for Online Office Hours - Appear.in

Two weeks ago we conducted a webinar in which we presented two conferencing tools as excellent options for holding synchronous office hours for an online class—appear.in and Blackboard Collaborate. We chose these tools, specifically, because we feel that they can be used in conjunction to respond to different needs. Blackboard Collaborate is robust, feature rich, and built into Blackboard directly, but it is also complicated. Appear.in is much simpler to use, but it can’t handle more than 6 students at a time, it isn’t built directly into Blackboard and it isn’t as feature rich. We wanted to cover how to use both tools so faculty and administrators could pick and choose what works best for them in their individual contexts. For instance: in large classes with broadly attended conference sessions, Blackboard Collaborate may be the only suitable option.

Unfortunately, the audio for the Blackboard Collaborate half of the webinar is corrupted beyond recovery. So, we will return next week with a post dedicated to Blackboard Collaborate, in which we will cover what was in the webinar (how to start/schedule a Collaborate session, how to create a persistent Collaborate room) and more. In the meantime, here is the portion of the webinar on appear.in.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BHZvAthmXd8%3Frel%3D0