updated 2011-11-27
The Saba Centra software has been kindly shared by EUMETCAL for transmission of a few MUSC working day sessions via internet. Centra session allow you to listen and give presentations from remote laptop with internet connection and headphone, preferably using a modern windows system with firefox/internet explorer.
We plan to transmit via Centra four morning sessions, about one hour
each. These sessions are linked to the Agenda (html) and also to the bottom of this page. You can join a
session 15 minutes before the start, to tune your system for
transmission. The sessions will be recorded and made available
afterwards. Please note that you can also yourself store the agenda as
pdf, which means that you will get a pdf copy of the presentation
slides. For this you need to press a button on the left-hand-side
panel.
To join a session and listen a recording, you need a
password. It is the same for all sessions and given in the end of the
Agenda. To login, you are asked to provide your e-mail address and the
password. The sessions are open to everyone providing correct
password, even without registration beforehand.
Please point your browser Firefox/Internet Explorer from a Windows system to eumetcal.centra.com . Choose System Check from the upper blue line and follow the instructions. It should be sufficient to perform the system check once for each computer. You might also check the title "Public recordings" on the left. There are a few recorded lessons, which you may open without password. You might try to listen the playback of e.g. a Climate SAF session from 11 October 2011. Give your e-mail address to start playback.
A bit older information, hopefully still somewhat valid, can be found on the 2009 course on NWP. There is also a photo of course participants in front of the FMI building in Helsinki ... Please login as guest. Note that those days, another piece of software called Elluminate was also used, but it is not available anymore. Thus, please ignore the Elluminate recordings this time.
In fact, you can also join our sessions before the scheduled time. Only there will be no slides and most probably no other participants. However, you should be able to see how the interface looks like and press buttons, as well as to start the technical test from the session.
MUSC working day sessions will be available 15 minutes prior the
scheduled time. You can find them in two different ways: following the
links in the Agenda or at this page, or, directly from "Public events"
at the eumetcal.centra.com site (choose to show "All"). Press "attend"
to join the sessions.
Note that all times are given in UTC! And sorry for the early
mornings for those living too close to the Greenwich meridian
... Please remember that you can well join from your home laptop, from
the kitchen table for example.
As a participant, you can follow the presentation, raise your hand to comment or ask questions, send signals of approval or disapproval etc. You will see the slides and hear the voice of the presenter. You are not in a video session, so you cannot see the presenter or wave hand to the the other participants (at least not all the time).
If you have technical questions during the sessions, you can use text chat to send a message to the session leader. Please do this in case you e.g. cannot hear anything - there may be a problem either in your computer's sound system or in the sending microphone.
At the Saba Centra site you can find information for participants, like this quick reference (pdf) for the desktop users. You should join as desktop user, because this gives your the best quality of session. Unfortunately, this means that you can join only from a Windows (or Mac?), Linux does not work properly.
For Centra, slides as ppt will be needed. Sharing a desktop to show everything else (e.g. a script running MUSC in a x-window) also might work but we cannot guarantee everything will be fine this way. Better to avoid anything exotic ... Internally, the system will convert the uploaded ppt slides to jpg, to save time and space. A presenter or co-presenter has a full control of the slides (he/she could e.g. jump from one slide to another in any order), the students will follow. You will be given the floor by the leader of each session.
Request to the presenters: please provide your slides well before the session by sending them to the organisers. We will upload them for you to present. Animations should be uploaded separately, for the participants to download and watch in their own computers. To be sure, most common formats for animation should be used. Or still better, do not show animations ...