Teaching rooms and contact numbers (landline)

Southampton:       Teaching Room 4 (Fishbowl) [B46/2001] , no landline

RHUL:                       Main Seminar Room, contact number  +44 1784276172

Sussex:                    Pevensey 3 L2, contact number  +44 1273877622

QMUL:                     FB 3.11, no landline

RAL:                         Seminar Room 1, no landline

Lecture/room/venue booking procedure (for lecturers)

The Schedule management is done via Google Calendar, which combines different google calendars from the NExT nodes at

https://sites.google.com/site/nextphd/next-phd-schedule

(this page) in different colours.

There  are simple rules for PhD Lecturers to proceed effectively with scheduling and booking their lectures:

1. Every lecturer has an editing access to his/her own course schedule.

2. Every lecturer is responsible for keeping the schedule of his/her course updated as well as booking of both a physical and virtual VC rooms, as follows.

   a) For a physical room booking you should ask your secretary to book the VC room from where you are lecturing, according to the google         calendar. You should also contact the local PG training coordinators at the various nodes to make sure their VC rooms are available and         booked at the chosen times. Failing this, there is always the possibility for the remote attendees to use Deskstop/Laptop licences to         follow individually or in group, as described here. This is not encouraged though as it should only be used in exceptional circumstances         (eg, students are away, etc.).

   b) For virtual room booking, please follow the  instructions found here. Virtual room booking via Visionable (ex Visimeet) of SEPnet rooms         (or any other room running Visionable software)  is straightforward. If you need to invite to your event non-Visionable endpoints (like the RAL VC room, or a Vidyo session, etc.), please see the IOCOM support information found here. The Visionable own scheduling system is very simple to use and should enable you to make the required booking seamlessly. However, it does not automatically alert the IT staff supposed to prepare the VC room you will be lecturing from, so you should contact the relevant person yourself directly. The names and contact details can be found here. In case of questions, problems, etc. you can get help from your own PG training coordinator and/or IT support staff.

3. Once you are happy with your schedule/booking please let all local PG training coordinators know, so they will  announce your course to all students by email. It is always good practice to communicate with the students regarding offer, content and schedule of courses via the Course Discussion forum (link in the top-left menu of this page). Please also make sure that all local IT support staff at the various nodes know your schedule, so that they can setup the physical rooms appropriately.

4. Needless to say, please notice that you should do all this well in advance of your course to avoid last minute unavailability of physical rooms and/or IT staff, etc.

Using the Visionable Video-Conferencing system (for students)

NExT uses the Visionable videoconferencing system supported by JANET (initially deployed through SEPnet).

This information is designed as a “how to” to use the system, for students, lecturers, administrators and technical support staff wanting to use the system in receiver mode.

For new individual users to sign up and automatically be invited to the NExT community through a SEPnet account, please use the following link: https://janet.iocom.com/signup/sepnet.

This should register your account as a standard license and allow you to download the Visionable client. If downloaded from the JANET server, the client should have the correct settings, with the Visionable server set to janet.iocom.com and automatic connection. If it is not, then please change it on the sign-in screen.

Accounts registered this way are able to see all the other registered users in the NExT community, initiate instant messaging with them, join SEPnet meeting rooms (under Meetings) and view and playback shared recordings (under Recorder). This license has reduced capabilities and is not able to initiate and sustain proper videoconferencing sessions, so it should be used in receiver mode.

If you have installed Visionable and signed in yet cannot see the SEPnet community then please contact Prof Stefano Moretti (s.moretti@soton.ac.uk) or Dr Andrea Banfi (a.banfi@soton.ac.uk) who can then manually invite you to join the community. For other problems with Visionable software, please contact Visionable support. You should get a ticket number for your support query, please share this (together with information about your problem) with the NExT Institute Director and NExT PhD School Director.

JANET and Visionable support information is available here and here, respectively.

Finally, you can also consult the full Visionable User Guide, the handy Customer Support Portal leaflet and keep track of recent changes to the system by checking the What's Changed guide.