At the end of July Blackboard will be changing the location of our Collaborate web conferencing product – from the existing SAS (Session Administration System) which is hosted in Canada to a new facility hosted in the EU. This transition aims to improve our service performance and move scheduled maintenance windows outside of the working day, meaning less disruption. Because the EU hosted facility will essentially be a new product and because data migration is unfortunately not possible, existing sessions and recordings will not be accessible after this transition on July 31st.

ACTIONS FOR STAFF USING COLLABORATE:

  1. If you have scheduled any sessions to run after 31st July 2014 you will need to recreate them AFTER this date
  2. If you have any session recordings that you will need after 31st July 2014 you will need to save them NOW

The process:
a)      Choose an appropriate sharable format

  • MP3 Audio Only Recording
  • MP4 Video Slides & Audio Recording (chat, webcam and web tours are not included)
  • .jar Full Screen Session Recording (the whole session is presented within the Collaborate environment & includes session slides, audio, webcam & chat) Note this .jar file can also be converted into an MP4 video file if required.

b)      Download your session recordings and upload them to an appropriate hosting service so you can share links to them

  • YouTube (a mobile friendly streaming option to share MP3/4 files)
  • eShare (a repository for your .jar files and any very private MP3/4 files)

Note. When you have downloaded your session recordings you should delete the recording file that is stored on Collaborate, in line with the university ‘conditions of use’ outlined in the Collaborate Service Description on the Learning Services wiki (login required).

USEFUL GUIDES

VIDEO: Saving Audio (MP3) and (MP4) Video from Blackboard Collaborate: youtu.be/SHVUHsS4plE
PRINT: Transferring complete Collaborate recordings (.jar) to eShare: eshare.edgehill.ac.uk/id/document/11733

If you have any questions about this planned change, or if you require any support please reply to this blog post or contact your Learning Technologist who will be happy to help you.