UW CME Online Course Help

The UW CME Flash Presenter (v2.0)

Table of Contents

Loading a presentation

1. From the online course page, open the course you wish to view by clicking the 'View Course' button.

Press the 'View Course' button
2. On the course page, start a presentation by choosing your connection type. If you have a dial-up modem, click the 'Dial-up' link. If you are connected with a Cable Modem or DSL, click the 'Cable/DSL' link. If you are in the office and equipped with a high-speed T1 line or better, click the 'T1+' link. Audio and video quality improve with faster connections, so if you don’t mind waiting a while, feel free to choose a higher speed download.

Choose your connection speed
3. The presentation will begin to load in a new window. A pair of green progress bars in the lower left corner will let you know how much remains.

Progress bars track the loading video and audio
4. Once both the audio and video for a presentation have fully loaded, a 'Start Presentation' button will appear in the lower right corner of the window. To start playback, simply press this button.

The presentation is ready to play

Playing a presentation

1. Once playback begins, you will see the full presentation window. The window contains 4 main components: the Slide pane, the Speaker pane, the Text pane, and the Control panel.

The Flash Presenter playback window
2. The Control pane works a bit like the controls on a VCR. Let’s take a look at a few of the basic functions:

The Control pane in play mode
1. The Volume Slider: Use the volume slider to control the volume of audio playback. You can drag the slider, or click in the slider track to jump to a valume. You can also mute a presentation by clicking the speaker icon at the bottom of the slider.
2. The Play Button: When a presentation is playing, the play button is lit green. When paused, the play button will be unlit. To resume play, just click the button.
3. The Pause Button: You can pause playback by clicking the pause button. When playback is paused, the button will be lit yellow. To resume playback, you must click the play button.
4. The Stop Button: To stop a presentation, click on the stop button. This will return you to the initial load screen. You can restart a presentation by clicking the 'Start Presentation' button.

Navigating in a presentation

What about the other buttons in the control panel? They are there to help you navigate through a presentation to find what you want to see. Let’s explore how they work:

The Control pane in play mode

1. The Replay Button: Sometimes you are listening to a presentation and wish you could hear again what the speaker said on a topic. Clicking the replay button will go back to the beginning of the slide you are currently viewing. Playback will resume from that point, allowing you to review material easily.
2. The Rewind Button (Rwd): But what if you only want to hear a small portion again? You can press the rewind button to move backwards in the presentation. You must hold the button down to continue rewinding. When you release it, playback resumes. If you rewind beyond the start of the current slide, the previous slide will reappear, so slides and audiio stay synchronized no matter how far you rewind.
3. The Fast Forward Button (Ffwd): Similarly, fast forward allows you to scan formard quickly through a presentation. Heard enough of that anecdote? Just fast forward past it and get on to the good stuff!
4. The Next Button: Click the next button to move immediately to the next slide in the presentation.
5. The Jump Bar: At the bottom of the control panel, the jump bar is actually a pull-down menu with a list of all the slides in a presentation. You can click the small arrow at the right end of the bar to open the list. Scroll to find the slide you want, and click on its name. You will jump directly to that slide.
6. The Magnify Button: The slides in our presentation were created for live CME courses. There, they were shown on screens 20 feet tall! Because of this, there are sometimes details in a graph or image that may be too small to see clearly on a 15-inch computer monitor. Clicking the 'Magnify' button activates a magnifying glass that you can drag around the Slide pane to get a better look at the details of a slide. Warning: on slower computers, the magnified image within the magnifying glass may take a few moments to appear.

Getting the most from a presentation

The internet can be a powerful learning tool. We’ve designed the UW CME Flash Presenter to take advantage of that power.

From time to time, text will appear in the Text pane of the presentation window. If a speaker makes reference to a website, the site may be linked in the text pane. You can click on the link to open a new window and load the website.

Scholarly citations in the Text Pane

Speakers will also often refer to jouranl articles or other scholarly sources for the information they give you. Those references may appear in the text pane, where you can copy and paste them for your own reference. If the speaker has provided information about an online version of the source, the reference will be linked to that version. You can click the link and open a new window with the original source material so you can see it for yourself.

Errors

No system is perfect. From time to time errors may occur when you are trying to view a presentation on UW CME Online.

1. No Flash Plugin If your browser is not equipped with the Macromedia Flash plug-in, or if the version of the plug-in you have is too low, you will see the window below when you try to load a presentation. You can click on the link to go directly to the Macromedia website and download the latest version of the flash player. After you have installed the plug-in, just re-open the presentation and it should work just fine. If the problem persists, you can conact the CME Webmaster for help.

The flash plug-in is missing
2. Unable to Load XML Data The UW CME Presenter loads the data for a presentation from a media server at the University of Washington. Occasionally, that server may go down or be unavailable for some reason beyond our control. If that happens, you will see the screen below. If you see this error screen, please take a few moments to let the CME Webmaster know what happened. Please include in your message the date and time-of-day that the error occured, the name of the course and the name of the presentation you were trying to load. This will help us to trouble-shoot any problems, and work towards perfecting the delivery of online course content to you.
   
   Presentation data failed to load
3. There may be other errors that you encounter in your viewing that we haven’t covered here. If you run into any problems, please help us fix them by sending an email to the CME Webmaster. Describe the problem as completely as you can, including the course and presentation names, and the day and time of the error. Your co-operation will allow us to fix any errors that crop up. Thanks in advance for your time.