New! Instant Live Sessions – start sessions with anybody in one second!

In our quest for more speed, we created a new feature allowing you to start a live session in less than a second. And, your participants can join as fast as they can type their names and click on Join Live Session!

We named this new feature Instant Live Sessions. Besides allowing teachers to start sessions immediately, anybody can participate – even people not registered! Participants just need to write their names to enter the session. An Instant Live Session is different from a Scheduled Live Session, which you can program for a later time and privatize, and for which you can administer participants and payments. Scheduled Live Sessions require registration.

Instant Live Sessions are useful to:
* Start a session with anybody fast, even with people not registered at your Web Academy or Sclipo.
* Demo your sessions and live teaching room to students, fellow teachers, friends, …
* Learn the features of your Live Teaching Room. It’s much easier than riding a bike, but hey, better to practice a bit how to start the camera, activate audio, share your screen, upload a document, play with the whiteboard, change roles, etc.
* Verify that system requirements are met. That’s key! We get more than one “I can’t hear my students!” … just to find out that the teacher had not turned on the volume, or that the student did not have a microphone, etc. Do not start your first session without checking that your system (i.e., computer, camera, microphone, Internet upload speed, browser) and that of your students meets the requirements. In addition, we recommend that you and participants conduct the fully-automated-10-second System Check.

There are some things you cannot do with Instant Live Sessions.
* Schedule the session for a future time
* Describe it with title and tags, and edit these as often as wanted
* Make the session private
* Publish a price
* Administer invitations, participants and payments
* Promote the session in the directory of your web academy and the Sclipo Campus
All these things are, of course, possible with Scheduled Live Sessions.

Cool! So, how do I start an Instant Live Session?
Easy! Login and go to the tab Live Web Teaching in your Web Academy. In box Quick Links on the left, click on “Start Instant Live Session”. People will be able to join after the teacher has initiated the session.

For additional info: On tab Live Web Teaching, click on “Show / Hide Help” in the Quick Links box.

Ah, before you rush away to check out ILS… we also released a new version of the live teaching application. It has better audio, reduced latency, you can share part of your screen, and chat is translated on the fly with Google translate (eg, if you type “hello”, a participant with the Web Teaching Room interface in Spanish will read “hola”). We will post about this in a few days.

Looking forward to your feedback.