Shorter, focused video conferencing the way forward

Video conferencing has not made the inroads into face-to-face meetings that many expected and Simon Pryor, chief executive of the Mathematical Association of Victoria believes it's a question of delivery - and that long sessions via cloud-based video conferencing impede the aim of the digital technology.

Pryor, speaking at the recent PCO conference in Melbourne, Australia cited a recent project to deliver training to maths teachers across Victoria about a complicated piece of software called Mathematica that was failing to achieve the desired results.  

"Teachers were trained in situ; there was insufficient funding for centralised training.

"Now hundreds of schools have video conferencing server equipment and we could have delivered the training modules to schools via the conferencing technology - but we eventually realised most people were uncertain how to use it for educational purposes.

"Teachers failed to embrace the web based video conferencing technology - we actually turned the machines off after 15 minutes as everyone started to fiddle and get bored," said Pryor.

"We next explored the systems used by Australia's Distance Learning Universities from the 1970s and 80s.

"Several universities including Deakin University and University of New England produced courses (in those days it was bound paper), but they were delivering university quality courses to people in remote areas by what was known as Distance Education.

"Even then, they realised 'a big fat folder of stuff' did not encourage student engagement and consequently, students were not learning and were not submitting essays or feedback.

"So the academics switched to shorter lessons including a wider range of learning activities that made the program attractive to students and resulted in a much higher degree of student
involvement and participation.

"It was a highly structured program back in the 1980s.  So we applied those instructional design principles to multipoint video conferencing technology in 2013. We decided we would not deliver to 50 schools via the internet. Instead we would pick four schools that could host a meeting of 15-20 people.

"We had groups of people coming together in Mildura and Geelong and other regions throughout the state. We used shorter slabs of information and included activities at the local base to improve participation.  

"Our research showed even 15 minute sessions were sometimes too long. We found 10 minute sessions often provided the maximum benefit to student and teacher alike and used free screen sharing software to maximum effect."

These studies and practical sessions results have ramifications for free desktop sharing software in general.

"The lesson we learned is that if we stream something from our web site, people say thank you but rarely watch it," said Pryor. "If companies and associations reviewed the way they used the medium and opted for shorter, punchier interactive sessions they would see an improvement in results from their use of secure video conferencing."

Article Source: Shorter, focused video conferencing the way forward