Breeze: “A Wonderful Juxtaposition of Synchronous and Asynchronous”

Denise Easton, President and CEO of ULiveandLearn is a true believer in the power of Macromedia Breeze as a learning tool. Since the Adobe takeover of Macromedia, it is a product now owned by Adobe, whose Web site describes it as a "Web communication system."

Easton describes her Mendenhall, PA-based company as "a learning collaboration and communications services provider, software developer, and integrator." Or, more succinctly: "We set up learning centers for folks." As the name suggests, ULiveandLearn's mandate is to "support professional and personal lifelong learning."

Easton says her company has been using Breeze for about three years, mostly for remote Webcasts. It has been a key tool in her company's arsenal.

"What's wonderful about Breeze is the accessibility," she says. "You can use it from any location. All you need is a USB microphone headset and you can participate in the Breeze environment." Of course, users need a high-speed Internet connection, she concedes, but they don't need Breeze on their PCs. "They [users] aren't downloading anything," she says (they’ll need the Flash player, but most PCs already have that). "To communicate you just log into the Breeze 'room' and everything is run off of Flash."

Easton also concedes that Breeze is difficult to describe, because it is so many things wrapped into one. "It really is a learning collaboration and training tool. It's not just a virtual classroom; it's not just a virtual meeting room. You can share files. You can conduct polls. You can share applications, desktops, audio, video. You have any number of opportunities for sharing visuals--PowerPoints, whiteboards, Flash media," she says.

The other thing Easton really likes about Breeze is that it is "tremendously flexible," she says. "You can design the virtual space so that you can create different environments within a Breeze 'room,' she explains. "So I can go from a presentation mode, to a discussion mode, to a collaboration mode, to an assessment mode by simply changing the look and feel, but I never have to have the students leave that Breeze room. I click a button and the whole screen changes, and it allows me to create a whole different environment that allows me to reach the learning objectives I want to reach."

Easton says that Breeze is used for at least one component in almost every learning center project her company builds. Breeze's flexibility empowers her to be able to provide clients/learners with both synchronous (live, real-time) and asynchronous (on-demand, self-paced) learning experiences.

Such a mix is essential, she says. "Sometimes it's better to be able to offer things in such a way that people can pick and choose what they want and what they don't want. And Breeze gives you the capability of not only having a live session (that's one layer) but also of archiving that session and using it as another layer of a layered learning experience."

And so while ULiveandLearn has done a lot of live Webcasts for clients, the company is always trying to make their clients see learning as being multi-layered. "As we design a program with a client we encourage them to think about (various different delivery methods). How can you take the experience of a live meeting and extend it beyond that one instance? How can you take that streaming media and have it become a value component of a layered learning experience?" says Easton. "We tell them, you can save and archive that live session, and then it can become part of a new program or part of an electronic learning library."