I have been involved for quite some time with a project involving live training classes via the web and a conference call. The students call an 800 conference line for the audio portion and question and answer session. The web interface was initially kept very simple: powerpoint presentations converted to images loaded into a photo gallery, instructor would tell the students when to advance slides throughout the lecture. For the most part this worked great and was dead simple. I thought that most of the time simple was better. Guess not. Now several people involved have asked that it function such that the students computer reflect the current slide on the instructors computer. Personally I think you have to be pretty lazy if you dont want to do this yourself. Regardless I am not entirely sure how to accomplish this. I know flash can do this. I know it would involve having two different files: an instructor file and a student file. The instructor file would in some way let the student file know what the current slide is. I would guess this would involve flash/php/xml. I guess the student interface would need to continuously refresh in some way to find out what slide it should display. I know services like gotowebinar and webex do this and more but we prefer not to use them.
If anyone has any ideas, input, options, feedback, advice etc let me know, it would be appreciated. I am looking to accomplish this in the most simple manner possible. Also if anyone can do this freelance hit me with an email. I am open to all manner of ideas. thanks Mike
Posted 2 months ago
