Distance in a classroom

I was recently presented with an interesting situation, I have been tasked with adapting a blended lecture course to make it accessible for students to take wholly as a distance course. Part of this task is to film lectures which can then be posted on the university VLE thus allowing distance students to watch them and physical students to revisit them in their own time.

Due to a series of unfortunate events two out of four speakers were unable to attend and the final speaker not due until 3pm giving the students several hours to kill and no lectures. Fortuitously both missing lectures had given their presentations before and had been filmed so we could used the recoding equipment in reverse to show the lectures from last year. In addition to this, to create an element of interactivity I created forums to go with each lecture to allow students to post questions even though the lecturer was not there to answer them in person. I encountered a little resistance from the academics at this as they did not want to get drawn into a discussion in which they are required to participate every day. Taking this on board as a very valid point I went ahead and created the questions forum anyway (I know – slap on the wrist) but prefixed it by telling the students that the questions would be given single answers and were not open for discussion.

In defence of my rather wilful disobedience if the course is being opened up for total distance learning there will need to be ways in which students can interact with each other, with the materials and with the lecturers. So in theory as part of delivering a lecture speakers may perhaps need to add an additional hour into their schedules a few days after speaking to log in to the forums and answer questions. If it is established from the start what format the questions should be in and when and in what form the speakers will respond all parties will know what to expect. When moving into the world of distance learning, as my last moodle post alludes to, communication is everything.

I was also given the opportunity to observe students as they were watching the lectures in a way similar to how they would if they were alone. However as there was not lecturer present and talking was not quite so taboo the students started a discussion mid lecture. It seems to me that this kind of spontaneous discussion should, if possible, be captured without disruption to the lecture. After the video had finished I encouraged the students to go and start a discussion thread to see if they could take the debate out of the classroom and into the VLE.

In an ideal world discussions could be started and questions posted in real time via smartphones, ipads etc and after the lecture from the comfort of home. As it stands at the moment Blackboard does not load well on touch screen devices but that is a battle for another day.