Sultan Qaboos University

College of Education

Instructional and Learning Technologies Department

Report about:

Web Conferencing

Done By:

Asma Al-kalbani 82934

Byan al-Rawas 68712

What is web conferencing?

Web conferencing is used to conduct live meetings, training, or presentations via the Internet. In a web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet.

The Objectives:

Finding a common time for “class discussions”, particularly if students are spread over multiple time zones.

Ensuring the availability of faculty and student hardware requirements, including video cams and headsets. 

Coordination as the number of participants rise.  Conferencing with 15 is a different experience to conferencing with 150.

Advantages of web conferencing:

Eliminate the hassle and cost of travelling to face-to-face meetings

Create your own virtual meeting room .

Polling facilities, instant chat and option for multiple presenters.

Save your time.

adding the richness of vocal inflections and even body language to the discussion. 

It is an excellent way to brainstorm or hold group activities .

Allows learners to share slides and other electronic data.

Features of web conferencing:

Engage in two-way audio (students can use a headset (recommended) or a phone).

Deliver presentation in PowerPoint and a range of other graphic formats.

Engage in public / private text chat.

Share desktop applications for demonstration and instructional purposes.

Push web pages to participants.

Use a live whiteboard for drawing and annotation.

Conduct real time polls and surveys.

Build lessons to be accessed and delivered directly from Blackboard

Archive sessions for later review by both those who were present and those absent.

Limitations of web conferencing:

Bandwidth and appropriate content

Highly technical content is more difficult to present during Web conferencing sessions.

users download and install Web conferencing software on their computers. This can be time consuming and also requires that users track and eventually remove the programs once a session is through.

Web conferencing uses:

Web conferencing is now a critical tool for online distance learning classes--both through real-time meetings and recorded sessions for students unable to attend regularly scheduled hours.

During real-time meetings, students can interact directly with faculty by voice or text online, asking questions and sharing their computer screens with professors to go over specific problems.

10 Fundamental Requirements for Any Web Conferencing Platform:

Web conferencing has proved to be an invaluable tool for today’s corporate communications. Allowing participants around the globe to meet and collaborate online, Web conferencing can cut travel costs, eliminate planning hassles and boost productivity. That is, if you have the right features to facilitate your event.

These 10 requirements will ensure that your Web conference goes off without a hitch.

1. Screen and Application Sharing: This feature allows conference participants to view any document, Web site or tool that a presenter has pulled up on his or her computer. Attendees can better understand what’s being discussed and won’t need to disrupt the presentation for clarification.

2. File Transfer and Document Sharing: With file transfer, users can upload and download documents to their individual machines and share them with the other conference attendees. This is especially important for events about proposals, briefs or other types of collaborative documents. 3. Text Chat: Text chat simply allows participants to send IMs (instant messages) to each other, publicly or privately. It’s a useful feature for question-and-answer sessions as well as one-on-one collaboration.

4. Record and Playback: If you’ve ever attended a corporate conference, you know how easy it is to miss another attendee’s

comment or an important side conversation. Record and playback lets Web conference participants view everything at a later date. This is also helpful for individuals who could not attend the original event.  

5. Polls and Surveys: These are easy ways to get immediate user feedback. The conference presenter has the ability to ask questions with multiple answer choices for the audience, as well as solicit public or private responses.  

6. Slide Shows: PowerPoint presentations have become a fundamental tool for almost every corporate meeting today. It is, therefore, vital to ensure that your Web conferencing solution supports slide presentation capabilities. Many offerings also support Keynote for Apple Macintosh users.  

7. Whiteboards with Annotation: Just because you’re meeting online doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice hands-on collaboration. The whiteboards feature lets the conference presenter or participants make changes to slides or take notes on a blank whiteboard.

8. Security: With a countless number of security threats plaguing the Internet, it’s essential for your Web conferencing solution to have the right defenses in place. Tools including firewalls, password protection and encryption are good indicators that the offering you’re considering will protect your event from online infiltrators.

9. Video Integration: Seeing is believing, right? With a simple

desktop video camera, video integration allows attendees to view each other and the presenter.

10. VoIP: While many Web conferencing solutions get by with simple audio capabilities, you’ll want to be sure that your choice has VoIP. VoIP, or Voice over IP — a voice-communications technology that uses the Internet instead of traditional phone lines — lets participants talk in real-time through headsets and their computers’ speakers. This simplifies your conference by limiting all communications to individuals’ machines; participants won’t have to worry about having a phone line available during the conference.

Of course, there are a host of additional Web conferencing features available to help meet your individual needs, and vendors will be promoting them shamelessly. But without these 10 fundamental capabilities, your event will likely be plagued with too many problems and too few features to be effective.

Example:

Webex is a Web-based Web conferencing service. It combines real-time desktop sharing with phone conferencing. It has comparable features to NetMeeting but is an externally managed service. It works for individual or small-scale implementations, as well as large corporate implementations.

Webex can be used on multiple platforms (e.g., Windows, Macintosh) as long as users have an appropriate Web browser, such as Navigator or Internet Explorer.

Advantages of Webex :

Get more done without leaving your office.

Improve collaboration.

Make meetings more efficient.

Train more people.

Record meetings for those who missed the session.

Resolve support issues faster to better serve your customers.

Screenshots:

Case Study:

McMaster University Faculty of Health Sciences trialed Wimba's Live Classroom Web

conferencing technology to support education and curriculum activities with students and faculty.

The Objective of the study:

Explore faculty, staff, and student perceptions of Web conferencing as a support for teaching and learning in health sciences.

Methods:

Q-methodology was used to identify unique and common viewpoints of participants who had exposure to Web conferencing to support educational applications during the trial evaluation period.

This methodology is particularly useful for research on human perceptions and interpersonal relationships to identify groups of participants with different perceptions. It mixes qualitative and quantitative methods. In a Q-methodology study, the goal is to uncover different patterns of thought rather than their numerical distribution among the larger population.

The Results:

A total of 36 people participated in the study, including medical residents (14), nursing graduate students (11), health sciences faculty (9), and health sciences staff (2). Three unique viewpoints were identified:

The majority of respondents were pragmatists who endorsed the value of Web conferencing yet identified that technical and ease-of-use problems could jeopardize its use.

Positive communicators (28%) enjoyed technology and felt that Web conferencing could facilitate communication in a variety of contexts.

Shy enthusiasts (11% ) were also positive = and comfortable with the technology but differed in that they preferred communicating from a distance rather than face-to-face.

Common viewpoints were held by all groups: they found Web conferencing to be superior to audio conferencing alone, felt more training would be useful, and had no concerns that Web conferencing would hamper their interactivity with remote participants or that students accustomed to face-to-face learning would not enjoy Web conferencing.

Conclusions:

Overall, all participants, including pragmatists who were more cautious about the technology, viewed Web conferencing as an enabler, especially when face-to-face meetings were not possible. Adequate technical support and training need to be provided for successful ongoing implementation of Web conferencing.

Frame Work for Distance Education:

Time of interaction Synchronous

Asynchronous

Type of interaction Student-student

Student-teacher

Student-content

Student-machine

Learning style Group-based

Self-based learning

Flexibility

Anytime

Anyplace

Ease of access/use

Speed

Development

Feedback

Delivery

Instruction Stand-alone medium

Multimedia support

Cost High cost