Enhancing Dialogue With Web Conferencing
Bill Bruck, Ph.D.
People say that distance learning often tends to replicate the worst practices of education electronically. This is especially true of distance learning programs that emphasize broadcasting lectures to multiple sites in real time.
Unfortunately, lecture is one of the worst ways to transfer knowledge and skills. Research demonstrates that people learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process. In face-to-face learning environments, good instructors supplement lectures with a variety of active learning modalities, such as structured exercises, case studies, small group discussions, and experiments.
These active learning modalities have something in common. They focus on the interactions between one learner and another or between learners and the instructor. The interaction they all have in common is dialog. Dialog is an essential part of the active learning process. This is especially true when teaching higher order cognitive skills such as analysis, integration, discrimination, generalization, and critical thinking.
In face-to-face learning environments, seminars exemplify dialogue. In seminars, dialogue is serial in nature. Only one person can talk at a time if the group hopes to understand what is going on. In fact, all real-time verbal communication is serial in nature, whether it is face-to-face or at a distance. Even in videoconferences and teleconferences, only one person can speak at once. Even in real-time written communication, such as one finds in chat rooms, it is difficult for the group to follow simultaneous multiple conversational threads.
Thus one of the shortcomings of seminars, teleconferences and other real-time learning modalities is the serial nature of dialogue, in which instructors often see a "democracy of the loudest" or a "democracy of the quickest thinker." Conversely, one of the great advantages to asynchronous learning modalities is the possibility of parallel communications in which there are multiple simultaneous dialogues.
For this reason, and for the convenience of the learners, many distance learning designs include an asynchronous communications tool.
However, because dialogue is so important to the learning process, it is especially important that our asynchronous communications tools facilitate learner dialogue to the maximum extent possible.
Unfortunately, there is a basic problem with many current technologies: They simply don't facilitate conversation.
Fundamentally, this is because most of them are built on the metaphor of a filing cabinet, in which each conversational response is considered a separate item that is stored in a particular file. Using such systems often seems like reading a disjointed series of emails rather than experiencing the flow of a give-and-take dialogue.
For example, I visited the "seminar room" of a virtual university recently. Initially, I saw a series of topics related to one course.
When I clicked on a topic, however, I was disappointed. I read the item that the instructor posted, and then I saw a list of response titles at the bottom of the page. I clicked on a response and then waited for it to load in a separate window. To see additional responses, I had to go back to the original item and then go to the next response in the sequence. Some responses used quote backs; others didn't. I couldn't easily follow the flow of the discussions because I was always clicking back to the index, finding the next comment and then waiting for it to load.
This type of threaded discussion system is fairly common in many of the integrated distance learning programs that are offered commercially. Other distance learning courses use even more primitive conversational tools, such as email or listservs.
It's difficult to maintain a sustained give-and-take conversational thread with email, as most instructors can attest. Worse, email is essentially a one-to-one communications medium rather than a one-to-many medium. It is cumbersome to continually ensure that the entire class receives messages. Instructors report that they spend inordinate amounts of time responding to emails - a predictable outcome because the email is addressed to the instructor.
Listservs have an advantage in that all messages are broadcast to the entire group. Because the fundamental unit of communication is still the individual email, however, it is again very difficult to create a sustained conversation. Similarly, the central unit of a bulletin board or newsgroup is also the individual item. The server or client software may then thread these items together so that you can browse from one to the next. However, the underlying structure of all these tools makes them less than optimal for facilitating dialogue. This is unfortunate because asynchronous dialogue could be the centerpiece of effective distance learning technologies. Instead, it's often an afterthought.
One of the sleeper tools in distance learning is a very sophisticated type of software called Web conferencing. Web conferencing is for developing virtual groups and virtual teams, which facilitates dialogue and the creation of community.
As we use the term in this article, Web conferencing is software that allows a defined group of people to use a standard Web browser to access conversations that are stored on a Web server. In Web conferencing software, the central unit is an item and all its associated responses. Thus when you open an item, you see one continuous conversation: the item and all its responses presented as a whole.
Examples of commercially available Web conferencing software include Caucus (www.tmn.com) and the proprietary software used by Ziff Davis University (www.zdu.com).
Distance learning instructional designers can also create free Web conferences by going to www.nicenet.com.
Deciding on a Web conferencing package is a little like deciding on a word processing package, however. You should not choose the software solely on the basis of price or because it came with your system. You will be making a commitment to this environment. Your learners and instructors will be familiar with it. It's best to choose the right package the first time.
The best Web conferencing software has tools that make participation easy, facilitate instruction and administration, and create a learning community. Here are 10 things to look for:
- It should support multiple conferences so that the instructional designer can create conferences for separate courses, topics or groups.
- Learners should be able to log on to the system from any browser, and the conference should load quickly.
- Learners should be able to easily see new material or responses posted after a certain date, and they should be able to easily scroll back to see previous responses.
- The administrator should be able to control learner access by defining "auditors" who only have read-only access or by making entire items read-only.
- To monitor participation, the instructor should be able to see which responses each person has read.
- To build relationships between learners, participants' names at the top of responses should automatically include a link to a Web page where learners can post their picture, a short bio and their phone number.
- Each conference should automatically create a participant "roster" with similar links.
- It should support Web functionality. Participants should have the ability to upload a graphic into their responses by merely clicking a button - without needing to know HTML.
- Similarly, participants should be able to click on a button to upload a file to an associated file library. It should be easy to create links to files in the library or on the Web - again, without knowing HTML.
- Instructors should be able to create conference headers that include text as well as graphics, file links and calendars.
As any tradesman knows, the job's a lot easier with the right tools. Include the right Web conferencing package in your distance learning program, and you'll soon be seeing the exciting back and forth that characterizes a true learning community.