Transcript Centra Symposium - Aspen: Web Server Community Grids

Centra Symposium 4.0
Live, Interactive virtual Learning
by
Ahmet Uyar
Florida State University
CSIT (School of Computational Science and Information
Technology)
400 Dirac Science Library
Tallahassee
Florida 32306-4120
7/21/2015
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Introduction
• Centra Symposium 4.0 is developed by Centra Software,
Inc. (www.centra.com)
• Centra Symposium is designed to create a virtual learning
environment on Internet.
• It is trying to replicate typical classroom interactions in
real time over intranets, extranets and Internet.
• It does not require sophisticated hardware and network
connections.
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How It works (1)
• There are two types of people in a meeting, presenter and
listener.
• The presenter is the creator of the meeting and has full
control over the presentation.
• The presenter sets up the meeting and invites the
listeners.
• Listeners attend the meeting with their meeting ID
provided by the presenter.
• It is possible for the presenter to assign someone from
audience as a co-presenter.
• A co-presenter has the same privileges as the presenter
except the right to re-assign a co-presenter as a listener.
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How It works (2)
• By default the presenter has the right to talk. When a
person from audience wants to talk, first he requests the
microphone by raising his hand and then when the
microphone is granted by the presenter, he can speak.
• When a listener gets the microphone, he also gets the
permission to put some marks on the presentation.
• Up to 250 concurrent users are supported.
• The presenter can upload the power point presentations
on the fly even after the session has begun.
• No telephony users are supported. Only Pc-to-PC full
duplex voice communication is provided.
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Features (1)
• Full-duplex IP audio conferencing, no telephony users are
supported.
• Real time IP video conferencing is supported, so that
everyone can see the presenter or some other users.
• Breakout rooms: The presenter can break the main
session into multiple breakout rooms for team exercises.
• There can be unlimited number of co-presenters.
• The presenter can create and hand out an ad-hoc survey.
• A whiteboard is provided. It is possible to save the
content of whiteboard for later review.
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Features (2)
• Recording and Editing: Centra Recorder TM lets you
record live sessions in an industry standard, and Centra
Producer TM lets you edit recordings frame-by-frame.
• I believe they use the H.323 standard for recording and
communication among users. It is the industry standard for
web conferencing(audio, video and data)
• Centra Symposium allows existing databases, Oracle 8, to
be used as a eLearning repository.
• Enrolled participants can see the content before or after the
live session.
• Application Sharing: Users can share any windows
application including their entire desktop.
• The presenter can take the participants on a synchronized
Web tour.
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Features (3)
• Bandwidth requirements: It only requires 28.8 kbps
network connection.
• Content pre-caching: events can be configured so that
the event content will be automatically pre-cached on
participant’s PC.
• Tracking and Reporting: All assessment, user, event
and attendance data are tracked and reported.
• Distributed Server Architecture. Multiple Centra
Collaboration Servers (CCS) can be distributed across the
world to optimize bandwidth efficiency and provide
additional capacity yet still be centrally managed from a
common Web interface.
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Comparison with WebEx
• WebEx does not sell the server software, only sell the
services. On the other hand, Centra sells both the server
software and the services.
– Actually WebEx focus on ASP (Application Server) business
model is very successful and “forced” Centra to follow suit
• Centra provides breakout rooms but WebEx does not.
• Centra provides recording and editing facilities of live
sessions (audio, video, data), and WebEx appears to only
support recording.
• Centra supports Oracle 8 to be used as the database,
WebEx does not support a database connection.
• Centra requires 28.8kbps network connection, WebEx
requires 56kbps network connection.
• All of the other features are similar although WebEx’s shared
export model is more powerful than Centra’s for PowerPoint.
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Conclusion
• Centra Symposium 4.0 is currently one of the best
products in the market.
• It has a lot of cool features and very easy to use.
Especially the recording and editing seems very
convenient.
• Content pre-caching should also improve the
performance.
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