The University of St. Francis hosts virtual meetings on the web through what is known as "Adobe Connect." It's full potential to simulate face-to-face instruction can be examined through an actual teaching event that I managed recently. Here's what happened.
Professor Syd Sklar teaches a course in Outdoor Recreation-- Canoeing, and as a preliminary to the actual event on the waters of Minnesota's lakes, a planning session is held with students here on campus. But one of his students was in Colorado and could not make this essential meeting in-person. Enter Adobe Connect, a video camera, and a conference telephone. Through a web link, the student was able to attend the session in Colorado, and see, by way of a generously large video panel, the camping equipment and apparel that Sklar demonstrated. The conference phone enabled the student to call in and listen to some fairly good audio participation by Sklar and others, or to join in the conversation. Meanwhile, the conference phone audio was piped into the meeting so that anyone else logging in from abroad could understand clearly what was going on.
Instead of a conference telephone, a "boundary microphone" (with a wide audio pick-up pattern) could have been used to enable all participants to be heard.
The student responded to an impromptu questionnaire that the meeting was informative (on a scale of 1-5, she rated it a "4") and that both the audio and video information was adequate (versus inadequate).
And still the technology's potential was not fully realized. There were handouts to share; if prepared as PDF (Adobe Acrobat) documents, these could have been pre-loaded into the meeting and downloaded by the student. In fact, PDFs can be displayed in the meeting, zoomed in to focus on key salient points, and navigated to show the student-at-a-distance what is necessary at the "teachable moment."
If there are several guests, a polling feature enables the instructor to quiz or survey the students, not unlike that of using a "clicker" in a face-to-face classroom. The polling questions have to be prepared in advance, of course. If web links need to be shared, they can be typed into the chat window, and they will appear as live links.
There is also a whiteboard, and for desktop sharing, a screen shot can be captured and overlaid with a whiteboard to annotate whatever is displayed.
All of these features go well beyond the capabilities of a simple "Skype" session, are pedagogically important, and are cost-free to the faculty user.
The human resource requirement is intensive, with a learning curve that some consider steep but that others believe is quite intuitive, but there are instructional designers in the Center for Instructional Delivery who can facilitate. I myself hosted Prof. Sklar's meeting and ran the video camera so that the content could be most effectively presented.
Several faculty have mastered Adobe Connect to the point where they truly can host a meeting and produce results without on-the-scene support from CID.
0 comments:
Post a Comment