Exploring presentation styles in higher education teaching and research situations: distance and face-to-face

Abstract

Universities are increasingly using advanced video-conferencing environments to interact for teaching and research purposes at a distance and in situations that combine distant participants with those face-to-face. Those who use these technologies expect professional development support to do so but we do not yet have a comprehensive research platform on which to base this support. The research described here sought to explore research protocols that could enrich our understanding of this domain, based on exploratory quantitative analyses of presenters' behaviours and participants' perceptions of presentations. It identified a number of presenter-behaviours that may predict overall participant perceptions and that may discriminate between categories of perceived presentation quality. We conclude that this research approach may be capable of producing realistic guidelines for presenters who operate in distance settings but that these do need to address the particular circumstances in which presenters find themselves. IntroductionUniversity academics are increasingly using the Access Grid and similar presentation, teaching and networking technologies over high-speed networks (collectively, but over-simply, styled as video-conferencing), to present themselves and their ideas for teaching and research purposes at a distance. The Access Grid is a set of hardware, software, tools and architecture designed to facilitate collaboration over the Internet. It is very fast and allows presentations to be broadcast simultaneously to and from many different sites or nodes. These developments build on several decades of video-conferencing use and respond to faster networking, more sophisticated software and the experiential benefits of research and development. It should now be possible for several groups or individuals to maintain multiway video and audio communication and to share documents and their development. But anyone who has communicated in this way knows that the nature, and experience, of these online presentations varies greatly. The situation for presenters was summarised by Edberg et al. (2002) following completion of a collaborative high-performance computing course, in the USA, in the early phase of the Access Grid:

The Impact of Online Technologies and English Medium Instruction on University Lectures in International Learning Contexts: A Systematic Review

“…Clickers or quiz apps can be very useful in this virtual instructional context to check learners' comprehension. Furthermore, video-conferencing for teaching purposes can take place at a distance and in situations that combine distant participants with those who are face-to-face (Shephard & Knightbridge, 2011). The type of synchronous online technology that is commonly used includes Elluminate, Blackboard Collaborate, Skype, or Adobe Connect.…”