Much research and practice in the field of online learning has shown that interaction between students and instructors is a critical component of a good online course.
For these reasons, online courses from the Bloomberg School of Public Health utilize an interactive communication tool called LiveTalk. With LiveTalk, you can communicate in real time with any other participants in your course using the powerful collaboration environment called Adobe Acrobat Connect, made by Adobe. You can share information, ask questions, speak to faculty and other students, give presentations, participate in polls, and more.
Before you can participate in a LiveTalk session, you need to:
- Make sure you have the Flash plug-in installed.
- Have a USB headset microphone attached to your computer. Built-in laptop or camera microphones are not acceptable. Analog headset microphones are not acceptable. Headphones for listening to audio are not the same as a headset microphone. Inexpensive, high-quality USB headset microphones are manufactured by both Logitech and Plantronics and are available at many online and physical retailers such as Amazon.com and Best Buy. No technical support will be given to students who attempt to use analog or built-in microphones during LiveTalk.
If you need to check that your headset microphone is working, please review this FAQ. An additional, visual guide to setting up your Sound Control panel on Windows can be found here.
The First Time You Use LiveTalk
The very first time you use LiveTalk, you will need to install a very small add-in to the Flash plug-in. The process for doing this is covered in the corresponding section below. You must install the Connect add-in to fully participate in a LiveTalk session.
- Setting Up: Launching LiveTalk and the Audio Setup Wizard
- My Status and Chat
- Speaking During LiveTalk
- Sharing Content and Polls
- LiveTalk Help
