Introduction
The following describes a full lifecycle of how an instructor handles an experience session using the CloudShare Instructor Console:
- Before an Experience Session: Prepare the experience, add users (instructors and participants) and send invitations.
- During an Experience Session: Inside the Instructor Console, instructors perform a wide range of actions to guide, teach, demonstrate, monitor, and assist participants in real time (Instructor-led) or asynchronously (Self-paced).
- After an Experience Session: Review analytics, assess participant progress, and complete any follow-up tasks.
Before a Session Starts
Before an experience session begins, its preparation includes creating the experience, configuring its runtime, defining the virtual machines and content that participants will access, determining whether it is instructor-led or self-paced, specifying which participants and instructors can join, and sending invitations to participants.
- Instructor: The instructor invites participants to an experience. The instructor can then use the Instructor Console to monitor participant activity and progress, manage experience resources, and interact instantly with participants as needed.
- Participant: The participants use CloudShare’s Participants Viewer to work directly with environments and its content and to collaborate with the instructor and other participants through a standard browser.
CloudShare enables instructors to deliver two types of experiences: a self-paced experience or an instructor-led experience.
- Instructor-Led Experience Session: This type of session begins at a scheduled time and runs while the instructor is present. During the session, the instructor can interact with participants through video broadcast, chat, assist-me requests, and environment sharing. The instructor remains present throughout the entire session and may guide users or provide help only when needed.
- Self-Paced Experience Session: A self-paced experience allows participants to join and work through the environments on their own schedule, without a live instructor present. Communication with the instructor is asynchronous: participants can leave questions or requests using the Participants Viewer’s Chat or Assist Me options. The instructor responds asynchronously. Instructors can still monitor participants’ activity by opening the Instructor Console whenever they choose. The video broadcast feature is not relevant for this type of experience.
During a Session
Many of the same actions available to an instructor during a live experience appear in multiple parts of the Instructor Console, such as the side menu, participant thumbnails, zoom-in view, or full-screen view. Since some actions are repeated across multiple interface areas, the following list specifies all the options an instructor can perform during a session, grouped by functionality.
Collaborating with Participants
- Handle Assist Me Requests: Receive and respond to help requests raised by participants.
- Chat with Participants: Open a private one-on-one chat with a participant or message in the group chat.
- Instructor Chat: Communicate privately with other instructors in the session.
- Use Video Conferencing: Host or join live video conferences with participants directly in the console.
- Collaborative Participant Metrics: Track the number of participants engaging in chat, Assist Me, or shared activities.
Helping Participants with Their Experience
- Monitor Live Thumbnails: View realtime thumbnails of each participant’s screen to monitor their activity. Turn on or off the live view for specific participants.
- Zoom In: Open a participant’s environment in a larger, dedicated view for close monitoring.
- Multi-Participant Zoom In: Open multiple participants’ environments in one window, each shown in a separate tab, which enables you to toggle between multiple zoomed-in participant environments.
- Fullscreen View: Expand a participant’s environment to fill the entire screen.
- Take Over: Assume control of a participant’s environment (with their consent) to resolve issues or demonstrate actions. The Enable Input option enables you to activate mouse and keyboard input when taking over a participant’s VM.
- Share with Users: Broadcast an instructor’s or participant’s VM or Content to all the users in the session, to demonstrate a workflow or a solution to a problem (for example). The Stop Sharing option ends an active environment broadcast.
- Broadcasting to Participants: Use CloudShare’s video broadcasting option to conduct a webinar or conference.
Monitoring Analytics and Progress
- View Analytics – Experience-Wide: Open charts and metrics summarizing participation, collaboration, and performance across the entire experience session.
- View Analytics – Participant-Specific: View the analytics of the participation, collaboration, and performance of a specific participant.
- Track Multi-step and Guided Journey Progress: See the participant’s current chapter, section, and step within the experience. The progress bar displays the completion percentage of steps (passed, failed, or not started) compared to the total number of steps.
- Monitor Regional Distribution: View how participants are distributed across global data center regions.
- Use Sound Toggle: Enable or disable sound alerts for incoming chat messages and Assist Me requests.
Managing Environments and Sessions
- Extend Environment: Add runtime to a participant’s environment beyond the initial allocation.
- Extend Experience Session: Add time to the entire experience session for all participants. Open Environment: Fully launch a participant’s environment for inspection and management.
- Suspend Environment: Pause a participant’s environment while preserving their progress.
- Resume Environment: Reactivate a suspended environment so the participant can continue.
- Revert Environment: Reset a participant’s environment back to its initial state at the start of the session.
- Delete Environment: Permanently remove a participant’s environment from the experience.
- Change Step (Multi-Step Experience): Move a participant or instructor environment forward or backward to a different Guided Journey step.
- Switch Guided Journey Content: Guide participants to specific content sections or steps during the session.
- Monitor Status Indicators: Track participant states such as Active, Invited, Suspended, Resuming, or Dropped.
- Check Remaining Time: View countdown timers showing how much runtime is left for each participant’s environment.
- Report Connection Issue: Log and escalate connection issues for further troubleshooting.
- View Environment Details: Inspect environment-specific data, including IP addresses, credentials, and resource configurations.
- Address External Cloud Errors: See error indicators in thumbnails when external resources fail, and review the External Resources log.
- Shared Environment: Open a collaborative environment where multiple participants can access and interact with the same virtual resources simultaneously.
- Instructor Environment: Create and manage a private environment for instructor use (for example, to demonstrate workflows, troubleshoot, or test).
Connectivity and Troubleshooting
- Test Connectivity: Run diagnostics on a participant’s connection to identify network issues.
- Clear Connectivity Test Results: Remove the results of a previously run connectivity test.
- Reconnect Environment: Re-establish the connection to a participant’s environment if interrupted.
- Refresh Networking: Reset network settings for a participant’s environment to resolve connectivity issues.
Managing Shared Resources
- Share Files via Cloud Folder: Share or disable access to a cloud folder with all participants or specific participants during the session.
After a Session
Instructors can review analytics, assess participant progress and performance.