Introduction
Synchronous media brings together three historic trends that have broadened the reach of education in the United States. The first, in point of qualitative impact, was the arrival of educational television in the classroom in the 1960s. Second was the impetus and desire for distance learning, serviced by ordinary mail for more than 120 years now (Holden and Westfall, 2006). Third and most recent is, of course, the gradual widening of Internet access by households starting in the mid-1990s. When broadband access to the Worldwide Web became a reality for educational institutions, the result was a tremendous increase in online learning throughout higher education and down to the K-12 levels.
Since around 2002, another explosion in Web 2.0 technologies commenced and this resulted in an embarrassment of riches in instructional media choice. While it is beyond the scope of this very short review to extensively profile the media available, suffice it to say that these embrace stand-alone information channels and systems that combine one or more media (hence, the term multi-media so beloved of education technologists). In any case, the single components include Internet relay chat, email, file sharing, voice-over-Internet Protocol telephony (VoIP, the best-known stand-alone example being Skype), Internet Messaging (IM), sharing facilities (calendars, pictures and assignment files), and mobile phones that have gained access to the Web (Kawachi, 2007). There is also the combination of audio and static or streaming video popularly known as webinar (for Web-based seminar).
The wide spectrum of choices simply reinforces the central role of media selection in the Instructional Systems Design process. The first and foremost criterion, Holden and Westfall (op. cit.) suggest, is that the channel or medium chosen for distributed/distance instruction should enable the desired learning. It is in this light that we evaluate one of the available choices, the Elluminate Learning Suite package.
Details of the Elluminate Program
The Elluminate LS packages four of the company offerings so that schools may offer both teachers and students a comprehensive solution (Elluminate Inc., 2009). These components are:
- For the course content planning stage The Elluminate Plan! component enables the organization