Using Collaborate Ultra for meetings

While Collaborate Ultra is mainly targeted to the educational domain (delivering webinars, online lectures, etc.), it is also a useful tool for conducting online meetings. One major advantage to it is that unlike some other tools, guests to your meeting do not need a UAL account to login and access it simply by clicking on a link.

The setup steps may seem overwhelming and complicated but they’re fairly straight forward and best of all, it’s only a one time setup meaning it’s short term pain for long term convenience.

Pre-setup

If you don’t already have a personal Moodle space not used for a Course or Unit, you will need to request your own Moodle space. It’s always handy to have what’s called a Sandpit or Sandbox course for yourself to explore Moodle functionality.

To request a personal Moodle space:

  1. Navigate to Moodle (https://moodle.arts.ac.uk) and log in with your credentials.
  2. On the Courses page, in the Admin Tool block on the right hand side, click Open admin tool.
  3. On Moodle Administration page, click Courses dropdown at the top and choose Request new course.
  4. Select London College Of Fashion from the College dropdown.
  5. For Course Name, you can type what you desire but I suggest something like Your Name Moodle Sandpit.
  6. For Course summary, type in something like Testing space in Moodle for Your Name.
  7. Click Submit.

Once you’ve completed this, wait for the central Digital Learning Support team to contact you and confirm that your course is created before proceeding to the next step. If you don’t hear from them after 2 days, you should send an email to dlsupport@arts.ac.uk.

Setting up your meeting room

  1. Navigate to Moodle (https://moodle.arts.ac.uk) and log in with your credentials.
  2. Navigate to your personal Moodle space (see above Pre-setup steps if you don’t have one).
  3. Turn editing on in your course by clicking the Edit Content button in the top right.
  4. In any of the sections/topics of your course, click the Add an activity or resource link. I typically add this to the first section of my course.
  5. In the Add an activity or resource window, choose BB Collaborate ULTRA and then click the Add button.
  6. In the resulting form, enter these required pieces of info:
    1. Session name – You can type anything, my session is called Sheldon’s UAL BB Collaborate Meeting Room.
    2. Duration – choose Duration of course
    3. Allow BB Collaborate ULTRA guest access – check this box
    4. BB Collaborate Ultra guest role – choose Presenter.
    5. Click Save and Display.
    6. TIP: At this point, you should bookmark this page in your browser or save the URL somewhere you can access it easily. See Tip 2 below for more information.
  7. Your meeting room is now setup and you will be shown the Guest link which you can share with anyone you wish to have an online meeting with.

Email template to invite users to online meeting room

Here is a template for inviting users to your online meeting room. Don’t forget to download the image below the template and attach it to your email.

—START EMAIL TEMPLATE—

This meeting will take place online using my online meeting room. Prior to the meeting please follow the below steps to test your connection:

  1. If possible, find a web conference headset (like this one https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PS4-Headset.jpg). Otherwise, using standard earphones connected to your computer would be second best. If you’re in a private room on your own you could skip getting a headset/earphone as long as your computer has a microphone/webcam (which almost every modern laptop would).
  2. Go to my online meeting room located at COPY & PASTE YOUR GUEST LINK HERE.
  3. Type in your name and click the Join Session button.
  4. Follow the instructions in the attached image (Collaborate Intro Slide.png) for setting up and testing your audio and video.
  5. Let me know if you run into any problems.

—END EMAIL TEMPLATE—

Collaborate Intro Slide
Instructions for setting up Collaborate Ultra

Tips

  1. To make the guest link easier to share, it’s nice to use a URL shortening service like https://bit.ly or https://goo.gl. I always keep the URL in my email signature so that it’s handy for me to copy and paste it to users.
  2. To access the room as a Moderator, you will need to navigate back to the activity inside Moodle. If you followed the Tip in the above settings, you should be able to navigate to the room easily in the future.

 

 


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