05 August 2015, 11:00

I've made some progress on this. I used to have the Adobe Connect software but now in semi-retirement I have found the free google solution to be more powerful in some ways.

Our social learn mahara site for Methodist church members has for a number of years used a Night School group to collate dialogue through forum interaction and static content. We used to provide a link to the Connect meetings. 

Now by setting up links to Hangouts on air (created on a google plus event page) we create a common look and feel for curating live, recorded video content. This is a significant addition, broadening the curation in the ePortfolio.

The next step is to award attendance badges for professional development with the evidence step being located back in 6senses or if the participant prefers on the Event page.

In large measure this solves the problem that I have long seen with mahara - social learning requires video and/or real time chat. And, of course, there is no current provision for this in mahara. Using a variety of 3rd party plugins is the obvious workaround and I followed some forum discussion on this.

This is because the google Event page allows for the three different kinds of real-time interaction in the one location. Chat, video call (up to 10 max) and recorded hangouts on air. All plugins we require in one step.

07 August 2015, 9:00

Hello David,

Thank you for this great update and explanation of your workaround. At the AAEEBL 2015 conference in Boston last week, integration between different systems was mentioned quite a bit in contrast to re-building existing functionality of well-liked systems in an ePortfolio software. For your scenario, there is no real integration yet except for linking directly to the hangout or the Google+ page. I wonder though if there were an opportunity to facilitate linking to these places / embedding them more easily (if Google allowed for it of course).

I'm not a big user of Hangouts or Google+ pages and thus wouldn't know of a possible solution at the top of my head. Though isn't Google Hangout on air just a YouTube video? Would the link to the video already exist before the Hangout starts so you could embed it into your Mahara page?

Cheers

Kristina

03 October 2015, 10:20

Hi Kristina

You can embed the You Tube live video into the mahara page as you suggest. I did this on a trial basis and found there was some appreciable time delay.

Also, there is much greater opportunity for audience engagement through the google+ page where the Live Hangout lives. In particular the applause feedback gets recorded there, along with the live Q&A which time-stamps the video in a really helpful way.

I think there is Java script that can be added to embed the google+ page. At this stage we are still too new to the processes of scheduled hangouts-on-air to look at that, but sometime in the future it's a possibility.

Meantime if anyone is interested you can look at our first micro-mooc It comes via our mahara instance known as 6senses.nz

I hadn't realised how simple it was to set-up. Anyone who has a resource in the form of well-designed mahara group page (stress on the 'design'), a forum and good content to share really has it in a nutshell. In my case it was really overlooking the obvious.

As our site is for adult social learning/professional development, and is relatively small, about 400 members of whom about 150 are active this year, it's a great solution.

03 October 2015, 12:12

Hello David,

Thank you for sharing your micro-MOOC idea also in the newsletter. I'd love to hear how it goes.

As for the Google Hangouts on Air embed code, it looks just like a standard YouTube link to me (once I had found it). So you should be good to go to just put it into a Mahara page. I created a page on your site and embedded the link that is given on your events page in the "Details" block under "Links" and shared the page with you.

Cheers

Kristina

03 October 2015, 19:24

Yes, thanks for that Kristina. It  embeds the video player but not the entire page.

That was what I had tried before.

It caught me out in terms of inadvertently starting the meeting ahead of time because I didn't have the whole event page in front of me. But that was my own lack of familiarity. 

Another place to start the Live-on-air is in the You Tube channel itself which will offer the same code.

But again that cuts out a whole lot of functionality that comes with a scheduled hangout-on-air google+ event page.

E.g. I can see at a glance who has responded yes, no, maybe and who hasn't responded and can re-target accordingly.  

Our first micro-mooc is to extended google+ circles rather than public.

And, on reflection  I think the answer to embedding the whole page might be simply around whether or not it is a public or private event. All my events, including the first micro-mooc are private, therefore the embed page code will not be available? 

I will let you know about this. 

07 October 2015, 21:37

Hello David,

I haven't been able to find a link for a whole event page and was already happy that I found the one for the video.

If there is some Javascript code in it, a filter would need to be created for that particular code to be whitelisted. Then you'd be able to embed the entire events page. I would think that a private event would also show up if you are signed in to Google and can view the event.

Cheers

Kristina