SPOC

Any guesses what S.P.O.C. stands for? I'll give you a hint: It's a product of St. Petersburg College, and assists instructors with online communication. If you guessed Selective Product for Our College, you are not entirely wrong.

SPOC consists of a suite of tools created for Angel LMS using Flash and Flash Media Server technologies. They are impressive tools adding rich functionality, with simple interfaces for instructors and students, currently missing from most LMS packages. Not that the same functionality doesn't exist in other third party tools such as Wimba, but alternatives and competition is typically a good thing. Some of the tools include live classroom, video recorder (for students and instructor), audio recorder, video responder (allowing instructor to add text comments to a student submitted video), and more.

Unfortunately, the tools are currently only built for Angel, although could potentially ($$$) be customized to fit other LMSs. The suite is also tied up in legal ownership issues since they were built with grant money from the federal government. So, here are these impressive tools and nobody is really allowed to use them outside of St. Petersburg College. But it's something to check in on from time to time.

If only this was built with an open-source model.