Chapter 2 Pedagogical issues

Eva Schwencke

This chapter discusses some central pedagogical issues concerning use of the Virtual Classroom. When developing the Virtual Classroom as a supplement to, or even a substitute for traditional local classroom-based teaching, one central issue is how to make students more active participants. The challenge of creating active student participation is inherent in all structural classroom contexts regardless of the technology used. Student participation is always a technical and practical challenge, but most of all it is a pedagogical challenge, since active student participation in the learning process is significant for the learning result. The question here is to what degree VCT makes it possible to facilitate active student participation in the learning processes, and what are the necessary conditions for this technology to be exploited to its full potential.

Virtual synchronous teaching, training and learning – a broadened e-learning concept

Recent years’ technological development with sound and image on the Internet, with high speed and low costs, offers a steadily improving technological learning environment in distance learning (Rapanotti et al. 2002). These new developments are likely to create opportunities both in traditional college and university teaching and for the increasing development demands in business and industry as well as for their need to educate and train employees. Each participant has her/his PC with a headset and microphone, either at home, in their workplace or at school, and participates at a simultaneous teaching session.

Many different approaches to the use of VCT exist, and a number of different terms are used for this technology. The unique aspect of the virtual classroom technology, however, is the flexibility of having classroom teaching sessions at scheduled times and duration, with students in multiple locations (Driscoll 2001).

The definition of “virtual classroom” (VCT), as it is designed for this part of the Socrates Minerva project, includes this flexibility and at the same time offers technological opportunities for a high degree of interactivity among participants. This may have great potential.

1. The Internet is used to deliver education and training, with a WWW browser as a major delivery medium.

2. There is an instructor and a group of participants (class) assembled at a fixed time and for a fixed period.

3. Small group discussions may be arranged in separate breakout rooms.

4. The virtual classroom sessions determine the pace of student study.

5. Communication is managed electronically, with voice contact between teacher and students.

6. Pedagogical features like video broadcasts, text chat, whiteboards, Power Point type presentations and application sharing are available.

7. Students have the advantages of the flexibility of studying on their own and the social advantages of belonging to a learning group.

Figure 1: Definition of VCT formulated by Desmond Keegan, in Krogstie (2004).

This definition emphasises some central characteristics. The virtual classroom is distinguished from traditional e-learning by the fact that interaction takes place synchronously, i.e. that the virtual classroom is similar to the traditional face-to-face classroom in that there is one instructor and one group of participants who are gathered at a particular time and for a particular duration (Paulsen 2001, Keegan 2002). The virtual classroom is different from e-learning by being group-based and not primarily individual-based, thus simulating the physical classroom. Another important difference between traditional e-learning and VCT is the fact that communication between teacher and students takes place orally in addition to textual communication. This offers a new dimension additional to distance learning, in that aspects of human dynamic communication are preserved. On the other hand this VCT technology does not include the use of images and thus differs from permanent video support and image phones. However, using the Internet and the classroom model, the technology offers opportunities for collaborative interaction between participants, for small-group based text chat discussions, for the use of video films and for application sharing, among other things.