Does anyone use GoToWebinar with Ethos? If so can you tell me what package of GoToWebinar you use and how you incorporate it with Ethos. Our group is looking into GoToWebinar and we are looking for feedback on how others use it. Feel free to PM me if you want.
Julie:
We’ve used it 3-4 times and after a couple of glitches with how I programmed the start and end times of the Ethos course we think it works well. You have to be sure that you allow a little time for GTW to communicate to Ethos that the webinar has concluded (can take 5 minutes or so). If the webinar goes overtime it causes a problem, so when I enter the end time I add 15 minutes to allow for overrun (our virtual journal club never starts on time so it never ends on time) and all participants are asked to wait until just after that to attempt to claim credit. The last time it worked really well, and we have another one coming up in December so I’ll be able to confirm the procedure from the last one.
I honestly don’t know which GTW we use–someone else sets all that up and sends me the link to include in the webinar course object.
Thank you for the information Gail. It is really good to know about the start and end times. I am sure we would not start or end on time either. If we go this route I may end up messaging you more if that is OK.
Hi Gail–
We are interested in doing this, too. Is the GTW link a course object that finishes and then the user moves on to the next course object? Is this what you are talking about when you say allow for 5 minutes for GWT to communicate with EthosCE?
Thanks,
Patricia
Julie: Feel free to get in touch anytime. It took us a bit to get this up and running, but in my opinion it was worth it.
Patricia: Yes, DLC can activate the course object for you if you don’t already have it. We ran into a problem with the timing because the course object thought the webinar should have been done and it wasn’t, so the object wasn’t seeing a completion when it expected it. Since the system can’t allow for a variance we had to ask DLC to re-run the completion for two webinars before we landed on just needing to change the end time of the event to allow for overtime, and then for GTW and Ethos to communicate about the course object completion.
I should also say to both of you that there have been no problems with the webinar running through the course object. We’ve have sound issues twice that were the fault of GTW–everything runs very smoothly through Ethos once it’s all set up. HOWEVER, to force people to enter the webinar through Ethos only (to avoid having the deal with two different access points) we have had to be sure GTW is set up to send NO email notifications of any kind. This was a problem when our coordinator wanted to send specific links to the moderator and speakers, but the workaround was for him to copy and send the links from his regular email, and that has worked fine as well.
Thank you, Gail! Very helpful.
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