The Integrated Conferencing Assistant (ICA) is a USP-designed initiative to improve support for core Learning, Teaching and Research activities by providing users with the ability to schedule their own Online Conferencing sessions that support the academic timetable.  ICA will provide automated integration between USP-hosted online systems like Moodle and Banner and external vendor-provisioned systems like Zoom to offer users a single point of reference for the booking of their conferencing services.  ICA will then automatically retrieve session recordings for insertion into the relevant Moodle course shells – without any manual intervention.

The Integrated Conferencing Assistant (ICA) should provide the following key benefits to users:

• provides users with the ability to book their own conferencing sessions (to reflect their timetabled sessions) with immediate provisioning of conferencing links – significantly improving the lead times for the provisioning of conferencing links.
• provide better user management of the conferencing session with enhancements such as automated host claiming to allow for a significantly reduced footprint of IT Services support.
• improved accuracy and timeliness through automation in the retrieval of recordings of conferencing sessions and their uploading to the relevant Moodle courses via the Lecture Capture system.

The ICA is intended primarily to provide conferencing support for the administration of timetabled student lectures and tutorials and to a lesser extent, meetings involving parties external to USP.  USP IT Services have also deployed a host of other* conferencing services to supplement the ICA as part of efforts to provide collaboration and communication tools to mitigate the challenges of the current unprecedented times.

Additionally, while the ICA has been developed to improve the efficiency of scheduling online conferences with the flexibility needed by the academic community, it will also help mitigate the constraints of space and distance while also providing support for critical emergencies like USP’s COVID-19 response.

For any query, please contact the helpdesk on email: helpdesk@usp.ac.fj or call extension: 32117.

To check on the overall bookings for all conferencing, the following link can be used –Integrated Conferencing Assistant Bookings.

*To supplement the ICA, IT Services have also deployed the USP Unified Communications platform based on CISCO’s Webex solution which supports internal USP staff communication via next generation calling, messaging and video services.  Additionally as part of USP’s enterprise Microsoft licensing, USP users have access to Microsoft teams to supplement the above tools further.

• ICA User Manual
• Training Schedule