How to use the Jitsi webinar room

Your Calibrae course has its own built-in webinar meeting room for instructors and learners to meet online with video, voice and screen-share. Take a look at these top tips to get the best out of your webinar meeting experience.

• Accessing the webinar meeting room (large screen)
• Accessing the webinar meeting room (phone or small tablet)
• Identify yourself
• Toggle views
• Sharing your desktop
• Explore mode
• Full-screen mode
• Mute/unmute your voice & start/stop your camera
• Raise your hand
• Poor quality - low bandwidth? Change settings
• Instructor controls - placing everyone on mute & removing participants
• Support for iOS

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Accessing the webinar meeting room (computer)

From a large-screen device click the Join course webinar button (if enabled by the instructor) to join the course webinar room.

The instructor may also have added a group webinar activity to the list of course activities. Click the group webinar activity to enter a group webinar.

Now that you are in the webinar room, you will be able to see and speak to other people in the room!

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Accessing the webinar meeting room (phone or small tablet)

Phones and tablets may need to install a plug-in in order to access course webinars. From the Your Courses dashboard...

• Click to enter the course. Because a phone or small tablet has a small screen, the activity menu is hidden away to the left.
• Click the Open Activity Navigation button to show the course's activities, including a link to the course webinar.
• Click the Webinar button to enter the course webinar room

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• When prompted, click Join to enter the course webinar room.

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Some phone and tablet devices may require a Jitsi plugin to be installed. If prompted...

• Click Download the app (or similar), and follow the prompts to install the plugin.

Devices typically require permission to access your video camera and audio microphone.

• Allow permissions.

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You will then be added to the webinar meeting.

• Try your meeting in portrait and landscape mode. See which works best for you.

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Problems accessing the device camera or microphone?

Take a look at www.calibrae.com/help-article/cant-enable-microphone-camera-on-jitsi for help accessing your device's camera or microphone.

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Identify yourself

It is helpful to see the names of everyone in the meeting room. If you haven't done so already, set a meeting room name for yourself.

• Hover your mouse over the webinar pane so that the webinar menu icons appear.
• Click the three dots for the main menu
• Click your user profile menu option at the top. Your settings pane appears
• Enter your name
• Click OK

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Toggle views

Each user chooses how to see the video of others in the webinar room. You can choose between seeing everyone in equal-sized video screens, or one main video screen that automatically shows the active speaker with smaller images of group members to the side.

To toggle to your preferred view...

• hover your mouse over the webinar pane so that the webinar menu icons appear,
• click the toggle views button.

Sharing your desktop

Any member of the room can share their desktop with everyone else in the room. An instructor may share a PowerPoint presentation, an image, a whiteboard session, a doc, a web page, etc. Everything that the instructor sees on their screen will also be seen by the group.

To share your screen with the group...

• Hover your mouse over the webinar pane so that the webinar menu icons appear.
• Click the Share your screen icon.

The images below show the laptop and phone views.

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• Click the Share your screen icon again to stop sharing.

Instructors may ask learners to share their screens with the group.

Explore mode

With a webinar meeting established, learners can simultaneously go and explore other course activities. When exploring, the webinar video switches from the main activity area to a minimised view in the top corner, but still maintains the video and audio call. The explore view enables instructors to guide learners through course activities.

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• Click Large to exit Explore mode and return the minimised webinar video to the main activity area.

Explore mode is not supported on small-screen devices.

Full-screen mode

For a bigger view of the webinar, click the Fullscreen button. The video fills the whole screen.

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Press the Esc key on your keyboard to go back to the regular view.

Mute/unmute your voice and start/stop your camera

Each group member can mute and unmute their microphones and can start and stop their cameras by clicking the Mic & Camera buttons.

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Instructors can mute everyone else in the group - sometimes useful when there is excessive background noise.

Raise your hand

With the group on mute, the raised hand feature allows learners to attract the attention of the instructor, perhaps to ask a question. To attract the instructor's attention, learners click the Raise hand icon.

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A raised hand icon appears in the thumbnail image of the learner.

Poor quality - low bandwidth? Change settings

In low-bandwidth areas, high-quality video and audio may overload the connection, making a poor webinar experience. Jitsi will try to automatically adjust bandwidth settings for overall optimim call quality. You can also manually lower the video quality from your settings.

• Hover your mouse over the webinar pane so that the webinar menu icons appear.
• Click the three dots for the main menu
• Click Manage video quality
• Select a lower quality setting
• Click Done

Instructor

Instructors have control to place everyone on mute and to remove learners from the webinar room.

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Support for iOS

Apple devices such as iPhones and iPads are supported from iOS version 11 and upwards (typically devices since 2017). Apple devices before iOS version 11 are not supported.

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