Blackboard Collaborate is well known as a platform for online events, but seemingly less well known is the (free) Plan app designed to work with it.
Plan lets you create a structured session plan before your live event and package into a single file all your content (presentations and files) and actions (start recording, next slide, create breakout rooms…) to be triggered when you need them. This is very useful for us in automating some of the routine set up for events that we run often, such as our online workshops. It also helps us better plan our online events, keeps us on track as we run them and frees us up to concentrate on helping people learn.
I made a short (2 mins) video to show you Plan in action.
I found Plan to be fairly straightforward to use. If you need more help with it, we’d be happy to talk to you about how we use it. Blackboard have produced a comprehensive user guide to Plan if you want step-by-step details. They also have some sample plans that you can download and play with to get you started.
If you run online events with Blackboard Collaborate, we’d recommend you give Plan a try. If you do, let us know if it helped you.