Sierra College - Rocklin, California
One thing that I've learned about teaching both on-ground and online courses is the importance student-instructor contact has on achieving student success. Many studies have showed the benefits to learning that increased teacher presence can bring. The challenge to online courses is carrying this teacher presence into a virtual environment. Something I found absolutely impossible with online instruction that is centered upon text based content that relies too heavily on PowerPoint slides to convey course content.
The identified issue is how can we, as online instructors, increase our students' perception of teacher presence in this virtual environment? My thinking is to look at available technical resources that provide education delivery that mirrors, albeit virtual in nature, the classroom. With my utilization of Visual Communicator along with other available online tools, I believe I've achieved that objective.
The key feature Visual Communicator provides is the ability for me to create streaming video content in a typical lecture format. I cannot over-emphasize the importance "ease of use" benefits product adoption. While I'll admit that I'm probably worthy of the title "super-geek," I've taught a number of my fellow faculty who are technology challenged how to use this product in about an hour's time. Using Visual Communicator is sort of like rolling out sod. You are instantly rewarded as opposed to waiting two months for the lawn to grow from seed.
Utilizing an asynchronous lecture delivery mechanism like streaming video has its good points and bad points. Lecture content delivery time is dramatically reduced. This is because students are not present to provide immediate input (in the form of questions). Before we jump on the bandwagon and say that is the exact problem with this sort of teaching, we need to be reminded of that student we have all had. You know the one--sits close to the front of the class and has the spring-loaded arm and is constantly being raised to provide us with questions more designed to attempt to demonstrate the student's level of intelligence rather than questions the course subject matter. I for one do not miss this student's question.
Then there are the other students who challenge your efforts to keep students on track by asking questions that are characterized as being from "out in left field." They have their chance in online courses through discussion boards. The good news is you are less likely to experience in an online setting many of those questions because something happens between the brain and the keyboard that doesn't happen in class between the brain and a student's mouth. Something I'd characterize as "thinking."
Speaking of discussion boards, I utilize Visual Communicator extensively in this environment. When a student posts a question asking for my response, rather than sit at the keyboard writing a three paragraph response, I simply fire up my studio lights, stand in front of the camera, read the student's question, and then respond as I would in class. The next step is to upload the video to my web server and post my response as a simple one-line sentence pointing my students to the URL (uniform resource locator) so they can view my response to the question. Again the idea here is to provide the perception of student-instructor contact.