1. Home
  2. Student guides
  3. Class Collaborate student guides
  4. How to use Collaborate
  5. Collaborate – tips when attending sessions from outside the UK

Collaborate – tips when attending sessions from outside the UK

Student Guide: The performance of Blackboard Collaborate will be affected by a number of factors including personal Internet connection, bandwidth, network connectivity and firewall settings. You may not have control over all of these factors, but the following guidance will help to improve your session experience.

Use an up-to-date, supported web Browser 

  • We recommend Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
  • We recommend that attendees in China use Mozilla Firefox as Google Chrome is not always available or reliable in China.

Ways to Improve your bandwidth

Your internet speed and consistency may be poor and will depend on where you live. To maximise your connection performance try the following :  

  • Use a hard-wired (Ethernet) connection to your router if available. 
  • If using Wifi, try to be as close to the router as possible. 
  • Close all other browser tabs, and unnecessary applications on your computer, when you are using Collaborate.
  • Close programs that are running in the background using bandwidth, such as cloud storage synchronization services – for example, Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive. 
  • Turn off your webcam sharing unless you really need it to participate. 

Check your Internet Provider. 

Network conditions for internet providers vary during the day depending on their own load.  The lockdown and Covid period has affected the stability and quality of several internet providers.  You could see if an alternative provider could give a better service.

  • Users with China Unicom and China Mobile report the best performance when using Collaborate. Users with China Telecom can experience more connection problems. 1 

Check your connection status in Collaborate 

If your connection is poor, a red connection status indicator appears over your profile picture in Collaborate. Move your pointer over it for the connection details. 

This information is always updating. Collaborate adjusts your experience based on your current connection. For more information on what your connection status means see this guide.

View the session recording 

If your session was interrupted, you can access a recording. The lecturer can choose to record a live session so please ask for this if they have not pressed record at the start of the session.  

  • A guide on where to find & view Collaborate recording is here: Collaborate Recordings
  • Your lecturer may move the Collaborate recordings into Panopto. They can be found by following the link to Recorded Sessions on the Blackboard course menu. 

Reporting connection issues in Collaborate 

  • Let your lecturer know if you are experiencing any issues that will affect your learning. 
  • If you have tried the suggestions above, and you are still experiencing connection & quality issues, open a ServiceLine ticket. It is helpful if you can collect your session data to share with us – you can use the Report an issue function while in your Collaborate session. Copy and paste the text of the auto-generated report into the ServiceLine ticket. 

1 Blackboard Collaborate Supporting Clients during Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) September 2020 

Was this article helpful?

Related Articles