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My name is Calum Thomson and I am the faculty E-Learning Support Officer for Business and
Law. My role within the faculty is I provide staff support and training in the use of learning
technologies both mainstream technologies such as the institutional VLE and online submission
tools, assessment tools, things like that, and also more innovative, less mainstream
things such as the webinars we have been working with.
A webinar is essentially a web-based seminar. So the tools we have been working with for
webinars are very much video conferencing tools, so they come from business but a lot
of the tools which are available within them work really nicely for a virtual classroom.
So we are not talking about streaming YouTube videos or Facebook conversations. It is really
an all encompassed tool which allows someone to present to a group of users, video, they
can chat, share their desktop, share files... With the software that we use we can do short
multiple choice questionnaires, we had a good way of managing question and answers sessions,
you can do break out rooms, so there are lots and lots of tools there which work really
well for small or large groups of students. With the webinar software that we have used
so far what we have found is that is almost like having a box of tricks which you would
want to have in every classroom if you could. In Adobe Connect, which we are using, there
is the ability to manage students well so you can either enable a student to be able
to talk or share their desktop or share webcam or you can switch that off. It is a bit like
having a... I describe it as having a magic wand in a classroom. They can raise their
hand, they have got flags to hold up to agree, disagree, give applause or laughter, which
is a good tool. And that is a good basic tool which is really easy for people that are new
to webinars to interact with. You can do some nice little question and answers, so asking
confirmation questions to ensure that students understand what you are saying. That works
really well. There are also really easy tools for making multiple choice questions. So that
can be used for surveying students, for confirmation of learning, for short pieces of formative
assessment, to get them to engage a bit more with what you are saying. You could see a
webinar or a video stream as being quite a passive experience for a student where they
sit back at their computer at home in the dark with a cup of tea and they switch it
on and they just watch it. You can actually engage them in a lot of different ways using
the different tools that are there. Another tool that we found was very useful
is there is a question and answer tool where students can still chat within a chat box,
and the way that we worked the webinars is we did team teaching where one of us would
actually do the presentation and talk, but the other would monitor the chat and the questions
that were coming through. So for example, if Rod was delivering he would go through
the slides, present, talk and not have to worry about what the student were saying because
I could raise things to him, and if a question popped up in the chat box I could copy that,
put it in a question and answer box and assign that to him and it would just flag up a question
had been asked. The great thing about that is the questions doesn't get forgotten, which
can often happen. You know, students half put their hands up in class and put them back
down. If a student half put their hand up I was in the background picking out that question
and then lining them up for Rod and Rod could cover them afterwards as well. So if makes
it very interactive for the students. Another way that we used the tools within
Adobe Connect was to allow the students to annotate documents on screen. So we could
work through a series of slides and then we would perhaps have an activity on a slide
that in a classroom you would print off and give to students in the class. What we would
do is invite students to take control of the screen and then fill that in for themselves.
It made some quite nice activities and interactive activities in there.
The Business School have been using this for doing little revision sessions and distance
tutorial sessions on a limited basis so far but quite effectively from what I understand.
What they have been using in there is breakout rooms where what they can do is assign students
into groups and then get them to go off and work on their own and then come back in. What
the tutor does in that situation is they'll go in and do a short presentation, ask the
students to discuss a point, and then split them off into their own areas where they can
discuss within groups of 3 or 4 and then she brings them back in.
Lots of these tools really do nicely mimic what a lot of staff would want to have in
a classroom to teach effectively within a classroom situation. A lot of people sometimes
find that the synchronistic part of learning is lost when you put things online because
students will, even when they engage with things like forums, they will go on in their
own time. I guess you can sometimes lose that getting everyone together and the 'social
constructivist' element of students working together. The webinar can offer us that. It
offers a platform to bring students together, get them to actually see each other, hear
each other and work within a real-time environment and even if it is for half an hour, I think
the experience that students have within a classroom, being able to replicate that online
is really quite powerful.