Virtual Classroom

Virtual classroom is an online environment enabling interaction between teachers and students. This interaction may occur over diverse instruction media. An instruction medium can connect participants either at the same time, such as video conferencing, or at different times, such as email. Each media type has its own benefits and limitations. Teachers need to understand when, why and how to use each of them, to achieve the best learning outcomes.

Synchronous eLearning

Synchronous elearning enables learners and teachers, who are separated in space, to connect at the same time. Through web conferencing, instant messaging, online chat or videoconferencing, participants communicate in real time, ask questions and receive immediate responses.

Students can see each other, observe facial expressions, body language and communicate as in a traditional class. They have opportunities to participate in discussions and do not feel isolated.

Synchronous delivery is best suited for sessions aimed at getting to know each other, building social support, planning collaborative projects and performing less complex tasks.

Asynchronous eLearning

Asynchronous elearning allows students and teachers to interact with each other according to their own schedules at different times. Communication takes place via email, discussion boards, podcasts, web based training, blogs or DVDs.

The key benefit of asynchronous delivery is in supporting self-paced elearning. Students who have to fit in studies with work or family life can download study material, work on learning tasks and communicate with teachers and peers at their own time. Gifted students have opportunities to complete learning programs fast.

The asynchronous media are suitable for work on complex tasks, as students get more time to process information and submit their responses, compared to synchronous communications.

On the other hand, this media type does not support social interaction and some students find it challenging to keep self-motivation and manage their time.

Virtual Classroom Systems

Web conferencing connects virtual class participants over the Internet, with the use of webcam video cameras and computers. Typically, web conferencing software have rich collaboration options, such as

Multi-point audio and video communication between presenters and learners
File and application sharing
Whiteboards where users can write an draw in real time
Breakout rooms for group work
Polling
Quizzing
Hand raising and emotion responses
Slides and media
Website tours
Public/private text-chat
Visual attention indicator

Examples of commercial web conferencing software are Citrix Go ToMeeting, Adobe Connect, Beam Your Screen, Cisco WebEx Meeting Centre and Saba Centra. Recenlty, Blackborad brought together two leading web conferencing solutions Elluminate and Wimba and created a virtual classroom system Blackboard Collaborate. This software integrates seamlessly with a variety of LMS, such as Blackboard, Angel, Desire2Learn, Moodle and Sakai.

Video conferencing is used to hold group meetings or live presentations over IP broadband communication networks, with video cameras and High Definition (HD) TV/LCD screens. A leading video conferencing commercial system is Cisco Telepresence. This type of video conferencing provides much better resolution and experience for the participants than web conferencing, but it is more expensive and requires larger bandwidth than web conferencing.

Podcast or webcast is used for broadcasting multimedia files over the Internet. It requires only a computer and software for creating multimedia files. Podcasts can be automatically distributed to the participants through RSS feeds and/or posted on a blog, website or YouTube.

Virtual Classroom Examples

Salmon Kahn, from the Kahn Academy, teaches pre-college math and physics with low-tech podcasts. In the podcast tutorials, he is thinking aloud about math and science problems and showing how to solve them in a conversational way. He goes step-by-step through a solution, writing the math expressions and drawing graphs on an electronic blackboard, while at the same time talking about them. He created more than 2000 tutorials, posted on the Kahn Academy YouTube Channel and website, where students can do exercises and track their progress. The tutorials have been a great success, attracting more than two million unique students on YouTube.

Stanford University is offering an introductory artificial intelligence course to the worldwide audience for free. The response has been enormous, with 145,000 students enrolled.

On campus students take face-to-face classes, while online students join a virtual classroom via web conferencing. As lectures are recorded, students can study at their own pace. Online students are expected to complete assignments, quizzes and take exam, but not to get credit for the course.

New media offer exciting learning opportunities for self-paced learning, with meaningful social interactions, focused on developing critical and deep thinking skills. Do you have experience in designing e-learning programs? We invite you to share your views and welcome your contribution to this post.