What is the Difference Between a Meeting Room and a Virtual Classroom?

Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro enables trainers to create rich and interactive eLearning experiences for their learners. For quite some time, Connect Pro customers have complemented their on-demand Connect Pro Training offerings by using Connect Pro Meeting to facilitate live virtual classroom experiences through online meetings.

Since many trainers talk about using Connect Pro for these virtual classrooms, I wanted to highlight a feature we released with Connect Pro 7 the Virtual Classroom. Note that in order to create a Virtual Classroom, your account must have the Connect Pro Training and Connect Pro Meeting applications enabled (and licenses for both).

By creating a Virtual Classroom, rather than a meeting room, you will be able to add another level of tracking to your online curriculum. Virtual Classrooms enable you to share courses within the Virtual Classroom and track individual results of your learners. While you can include the same course in your curriculum and have learners take quizzes on their own, sharing a course in a Virtual Classroom gives you the added benefits of a moderated quiz, allowing you to answer private chats as you proctor the test, validate the identity of those present, etc.

Type of Room	Connect Pro Icon
Meeting
Virtual Classroom

In a Virtual Classroom, you can choose any previously created Adobe Presenter or Adobe Captivate course from the content library to teach within your Virtual Classroom. You can teach the entire course or allow learners to go through it at their own pace. Learners can take quizzes on their own and their results will be recorded in the Connect Pro Training system. In the image below, a course was shared in a Virtual Classroom and the individual did not pass the quiz:

Because a course was shared within a Virtual Classroom, the individuals course results automatically appeared in the report data for the course (see below):

If the training manager had used a meeting room instead of a Virtual Classroom and therefore shared an Adobe Presenter document instead of a course, the quiz results would not have been tracked.

The image below is a Virtual Classroom. You may notice that it looks very similar to what a meeting room looks like. The only visable difference is the ability to choose Courses in the Share pod.

Licensing Requirements
For an individual in your organization to create Virtual Classrooms, the individual must be both a Training Manager and a Meeting Host. To assign an individual as a training manager, your organization must own licenses of the Connect Pro Training application. To assign an individual as a meeting host, you must own licenses of the Connect Pro Meeting application.

If your organization does not own both Connect Pro Training and Connect Pro Meeting, no one in your organization will be able to create a virtual classroom; in fact, there will not be a visable option to create one.

As for license usage, when learners enter a Virtual Classroom, all regular meeting activities are using your Connect Pro Meeting licenses. When you begin sharing a Course in the share pod, you also use your Connect Pro Training licenses for their access to the Course. As such, you will be limited by the number of concurrent learner licenses that you own.