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Best Practices for Videoconferencing

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Prior to the Videoconference

Scheduling

NYU's videoconferencing services are in high demand, so it's important to place your request for this service as early as possible—we recommend at least one week in advance. When filling out the ITS videoconferencing request form, be sure to provide as much information as possible, including the time of the event, the remote site's time zone (if different), expected attendance on your side, contact information for the technical support team at the remote site, and information about their videoconferencing system (brand and connection type).

Become Familiar with the Room and Equipment

Familiarize yourself with the room you will be using for your videoconferencing event ahead of time. Ensure that the room you are scheduled to use has the necessary capabilities for any instructional media you plan to use for your presentation, i.e., PowerPoint, videos, etc. It is also a good idea to test your materials in the room beforehand.


During the Videoconference

Meeting Time

Just as in face-to-face meetings, it is important to be on time for your videoconference meeting. If you are using handouts, be sure to supply enough for all the participants. In the case of a meeting with several locations, these considerations are especially important, though they may be more complicated to coordinate; for example, if hard copy materials will be used in the meeting, they must be sent to all locations ahead of time.

Meeting Chairperson

It is important to have a meeting chairperson who effectively manages your meeting time. Try to appoint a moderator for each location who can assist the chairperson by monitoring the time and encouraging participation at their site.

Speaking Volume and Distractions

When speaking into a microphone, speak naturally. Avoid excessive shuffling of papers, side conversations, and finger- or pen-tapping, as these can distract from the presenter. To aid in avoiding excess room noise, put your videoconferencing microphone on mute when not talking. Videoconferencing audio systems may be amplified to ensure that everyone can hear properly, and in more sophisticated videoconferencing rooms (e.g., Polycom Telepresence rooms), the microphones are mounted in areas that capture the audio evenly.

Your Physical Location at the Meeting

Avoid sudden movements during the videoconferencing event. If you will be walking around during your videoconferencing presentation, avoid walking quickly.


Teaching with Videoconferencing

Course Planning

Identifying Overall Teaching & Learning Objectives

Successful teaching and learning via videoconferencing (VC) requires thoughtful consideration of many of the same priorities that faculty set for their in-person classroom and laboratory teaching. Among these are the pre-semester identification of learning objectives, outcomes, and teaching strategies that guide the course and individual class sessions.

Learning objectives are the broad goals you have for your students. What do you want them to be able to do by the end of your course? Which abilities do you want them to gain or develop and then be capable of applying? Such objectives should recognize disciplinary and institutional contexts, such as how they prepare students to continue in the field. They should also be clearly and explicitly stated in your course syllabus or session outline.

Learning outcomes are more specific. They are the specific skills and abilities to be gained in the course. Outcomes are also the concrete measures by which learning objectives will be realized; for instance, gaining mastery over basic French verb tenses and vocabulary, or Gauss's method, determinants, vector spaces, and linear maps and matrices. Again, the more clearly you can identify these goals and explicitly share them with your students, the better.

Teaching strategies include anything that you do help your students learn. How will you help your students to achieve the objectives and outcomes? Strategies include the materials you use; technologies you may employ; presentations you make; or exercises, projects, and problems you assign. These methods of instruction should correspond wherever possible to particular objectives and outcomes.

Conceptualizing the Integration of VC (and Supporting Technologies)

Videoconferencing (VC) should be approached as a tool for facilitating learning, to be coupled with other strategies that support your students. How can you help your students learn by using VC? It may be helpful to consider three principles as you conceptualize VC's integration in your course:

  1. VC can magnify the gaps or weaknesses in your teaching practice; for instance, speaking unclearly, or poor time management of individual lessons. Careful advance planning and a willingness to reflect on your own teaching are crucial.
  2. By definition (and unlike a streamed videotaped lecture), videoconferencing is interactive - it is a technology designed for give-and-take between you and those at the remote location(s). The more you can imaginatively encourage interaction, the better the learning will be.
  3. Well-considered classroom management strategies while using VC are essential. Explicitly communicating task and session goals and establishing protocols and ground rules for discussions and other activities will help ensure productive classes.

Identifying Technology-Use Objectives

Which teaching strategies will enable you to maximize the potential of VC to facilitate your students' learning? Though the answers differ by course and instructor, the technology supports several proven directions for your teaching, including student projects and presentations, discussions, debates, skits and role-playing, brainstorming, and group problem-solving are all proven strategies. Many of these fall under the priority of encouraging interactive learning.

Another advantage of VC is most equipment's support of diverse materials and media. Faculty should consider—as appropriate to their own learning objectives—the creative in-class use of Learning Management Systems (such as BlackBoard), PowerPoint, video, smart boards, and Internet resources. You may also consider varying the presentation of these through different media, remaining mindful of the heightened value of distributing lesson plans or session outlines for VC classes (as detailed below).

Student Motivation and Faculty Flexibility

The use of VC technology can be a source of motivation for students, especially at the beginning of a course. However, VC should not be allowed to become a distraction to their learning. Encouraging dialogue and maintaining interactivity is the best general approach to maintaining student motivation. Following Keller (1988), you may also find the following principles helpful:

  1. Vary the elements and delivery of classes.
  2. Explain the relevance and utility of lessons to students' lives and values.
  3. Provide constant feedback and substantive support to students.
  4. Provide opportunities for students to apply their learning, in class and beyond.

Off-line and remote support for students (discussed in greater detail in the resources listed below) should also be developed and emphasized to students; these resources enable faculty to identify problems with learning and reassure students that VC is part of a larger learning experience.

For many faculty, VC is a new experience. Many faculty using VC find that balancing detailed course and class meeting planning with the need to adapt to the complexity of the environment and to students' abilities and learning styles is a great challenge. Flexibility is a watchword for successful VC teaching, and faculty should expect increased planning time - not only before a course begins, but in preparation for individual class sessions.

Additional Course Planning Resources

Training

Relevance for Faculty

As noted above, successful use of VC often requires focused and thoughtful consideration of many of the same priorities that you pursue in an in-person class setting. These priorities include careful pre-semester planning, sustained commitment to interactive learning, and continued self- and student-assessment. Familiarization with the VC environment will then enable you to incorporate its technical capabilities into your own more clearly understood learning objectives and course priorities. Training offered by the Center for Teaching Excellence and ITS supports your efforts to successfully implement VC into your course plan in order to achieve deeper student learning.

Additional Training Resources

Class Set-Up

Space and Technology Registration

Medium to large VC events take much of the technical work away from you as the presenter, but will require more communication with on-site and distant site support staff. Be sure to share your plans for individual class sessions with support staff as early as possible, particularly if you have other media requirements.

Material Preparation

"Behavior Guidelines" and Etiquette

The VC environment requires clearly articulated and commonly understood parameters for group behavior. Among the most useful and productive materials you can provide your students are brief guidelines for good, polite, and collegial behavior in VC courses. Some of these will be firm expectations and/or requirements related to the issues raised in your class or individual teaching practice; others will be more general recommendations about courtesy and respect. Setting them all in writing and distributing them to your students will ensure that everyone enters into the VC with shared expectations and understanding.

General Etiquette
  1. Be polite.
  2. Be patient.
  3. Relax and help others to relax.
  4. Once technical adjustments have been made, communicate naturally and avoid continuing adjustments with cameras or microphones.
  5. Dress appropriately (see Classroom Management).
  6. Turn off your mobile phone, BlackBerry, and any other potentially disruptive devices.
  7. Show interest in all participants.
Body Position and Movement
  1. Sit up straight.
  2. Sit still - or, if moving, move slowly.
  3. Gesture normally, but avoid swaying or rocking.
  4. Don't lean back.
  5. Avoid reading excessively; it shows off the top of your head.
Speaking and Listening
  1. Identify yourself when speaking; depending on the set-up, you may want to create a cardboard name tent.
  2. Use "handover phrases," such as "over to you," "what do you think," or an individual's name.
  3. Speak at a normal pace and in a strong, clear voice.
  4. Be aware that anything you say in the VC room (even in whispers) may be overheard.
  5. Speak to the camera (as appropriate).
  6. Ensure your microphone is on (as appropriate).

A final, related note: students new to VC may be very interested in the technology. To keep students' curiosity from disrupting your teaching, you may want to schedule some time, perhaps with a technician's help, to provide a summary of the system and its capabilities. While the goal is for the technology to become transparent and advance your specific learning objectives, an overview can be very helpful in addressing students' feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, or intimidation.

Additional Etiquette Resources

Session Plan and Timeline

Even if you do not ordinarily distribute a plan or outline to your students when conducting in-person classes, you should do so for VC sessions. The outline you provide to students should be sufficiently detailed to help them understand the overall flow of the session but not so exhaustive as to enable them to ignore the class proceedings. You do not necessarily need to include every detail of your own lesson plan in the outline provided to students. For instance, if you are screening and then discussing a video, then using the Socratic method to guide the discussion, listing the video title followed by "discussion" or "group responses" is likely sufficient for student outlines.

You may want to include the duration of some individual items in your outline, though a complete list of ten-, fifteen-, or twenty-minute segments can lead your students to pay too much attention to tracking your progress (or failure to stay on schedule or be flexible). You may prefer to keep specific durations to yourself, except in the case of student debates, skits, or other presentations where time constraints are especially important. In most cases, it is better not to include the specific time of day for in-class activities (e.g., 11:30am or 17.30), as they may be confusing to those in different time zones and may encourage clock watching.

However, be sure to include the basic logistical information in your plan, including the date and time that the VC will begin, time zone (if applicable), complete list of participants by location, and a contact name and phone number in case of technical or logistical difficulties.

With help from the technical or session support staff, you may want to prepare and distribute to students instructions to follow in the event of technical difficulties or a disconnection during the videoconferencing event. Consider adding these instructions as notes to the session outlines that you generate and distribute.

Other Materials

Videoconferencing is both a technology that needs to be thoughtfully incorporated into your teaching and an environment in which other technologies and materials can be integrated. Depending on the system, that integration may be complicated or straightforward, and may entail more or less ongoing staff support. VC offers powerful opportunities for employing other media and materials, but you should be judicious in their use. The imperative should always be to use the features that foster student learning and advance your course learning objectives, while not necessarily trying to use all of the system's capabilities.

The following are among your priorities for selecting which materials to include in a given session:

  1. Which materials or media will further interactivity in the class? Often, VC systems enable the use of an array of media that, particularly taken together, detract from interactivity and make the sessions more about technology than active student learning.
  2. Which materials or media enhance or optimize the VC experience? You should reflect on which materials you would use in an in-person class and which you are incorporating specifically for VC sessions, and whether your selections for inclusion advance your students' learning.
  3. Which materials or media will students be able to take away from the VC session itself, and use productively to study or solve problems? Well-crafted session outlines can be especially helpful in this regard.

Finally, consider asking for your students' input when setting priorities for selecting materials to be used in class. Check with them about what is working well (and not so well), and encourage students to help you develop materials. Examples of such collaborative work include student presentations requiring PowerPoint or other outlines; summaries of assigned readings; group note taking; and student selections of film, video, or audio clips from your lists.

PowerPoint Design Guidelines
  1. Safe title: When you are presenting graphics in a VC, it is vitally important to consider the "safe title" area . TV screens do not typically show the full frame; instead, they crop the edges to fill the screen. To ensure nothing is cropped off, set a boundary one inch from each edge (about 80% of the full screen size). All important information and text should reside within these boundaries. Pictures and nonessential information can fall outside this area.
  2. Font size and style: The University of Washington TV Production department recommends that type in PowerPoint slides be set between 24 and 32 points in size. The minimum readable on-screen point size is 20. Avoid having too much text, because people won't be able to read it easily. If the text flows outside the safe title area, split the information into two or more slides. Thin serif fonts, such as Times, do not work well on TV screens; use sans serif fonts instead, such as Arial, Helvetica, Palatino, or Lucinda Sans.
  3. Charts and lines: The bigger the text and legends are, the more readable the information presented on charts will be. Thin lines will "vibrate" on video because of the way TV screens update frames. All lines should be at least 2.25 points thick; consider using boldface.
  4. Colors and backgrounds: A dark background with light foreground text is best for TV and your audience; however, light backgrounds with dark text may be acceptable. Keep backgrounds simple and limit the number of colors in text. Other guidelines include avoiding highly saturated colors, especially red, and avoiding large areas of pure white.
    (Source: University of Washington TV, www.uwtvproduction.org/resources/powerpoint.html)

Additional Material Preparation Resource

AT&T Videoconferencing for Learning website: www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/vidconf

Classroom Management

Successful management of a VC class involves coordinating elements, some of which include clothing choices, assignment of roles to students, and regular interactivity. These factors, as well as others, contribute to creating and maintaining an environment where students will learn consistently and deeply. They also require thoughtful planning and implementation.

What to Wear to Your Videoconferencing Event

Most videoconferencing cameras are low contrast and low resolution. For the cameras to be able to focus on your face and transmit as much detail of your facial expressions as possible, you may want to consider the following suggestions for what to wear on the day of your videoconferencing event. You should try to avoid:

  • All-white clothing, which reflects light, causing images around you to appear darker.
  • All-black clothing (and other dark colors), which soaks in light and make everything around you appear lighter.
  • Any polka dots, fine stripes, plaids, or fine designs. Even at high resolution, the process of digitizing, compressing, and displaying stripes can yield jagged edges called pixilation and distracting moire patterns.
  • Big, shiny jewelry, which can cause reflections on the videoconferencing monitors.
  • Dangling jewelry, which can create unwanted sounds picked up by the videoconferencing microphone.

Your best clothing choices are medium-colored and unpatterned, especially shirts, blouses, and jackets. Avoid bulky clothes or "extreme" colors or patterns. Also, remember that a "loud" tie or "busy" scarf worn against otherwise muted colors may still cause problems.

Clarification of Roles to Moderators and Students

As recommended above, you should carefully structure your class lesson plans in advance and also distribute a summary outline to all students before the date of the class meeting. Depending on available personnel and resources, you should try to appoint a VC moderator for each site. The moderator will be able to assist you, the primary facilitator, by monitoring the time, encouraging participation at their site, distributing materials, and coordinating the proper operation of technology. The individual may be a local faculty colleague, Teaching Assistant or other graduate student, or technical support staff.

Because VC sessions will be new experiences for many students, you should be explicit with them about how to participate successfully. Students should take care to identify themselves (and, if a multi-site session, their location) before speaking until the group demonstrates knowledge of individual names. If individual microphones are being used by students, they should also be reminded to speak directly into them and, when done, to switch them off. In immersive environments, students should be told to speak strongly, though naturally.

Remind videoconferencing participants to start their question or comment with the name of the person they are addressing, particularly if that person is at another site. You may want to generate a roster or student map both for yourself and for distribution to aid students at all sites.

As previously mentioned, a subtle but very important prerequisite of successful videoconferencing for students to remember is that, despite being located in physically different places or unusual technical settings, VC students are participating in a "real" class meeting. This means everyone needs to be on time and prepared, pay attention and participate, and have the same information as everyone else. In a multi-point meeting, these considerations are even more important to follow.

General Strategies to Enhance Participation

At the beginning of the videoconferencing meeting, you may wish to introduce all participants or have them introduce themselves. Tent-cards or other visual name signs can be very helpful to the group. Rosters and student maps can also be a useful class resource for creating a greater sense of familiarity and comfort among students at different sites and encouraging them to participate with each other more freely.

Enhance VC participation by calling on specific individuals in specific sites (e.g., New York, Abu Dhabi, London) for comments or questions. Participation involving multiple students at a time helps peer learning occur. Class or term projects conducted by teams of students from different sites will also generate valuable inter-site interactions outside of the VC sessions. Challenge yourself and your students to devise and engage in group or collaborative activities besides discussion that are relevant to the course learning objectives. (Some sample activities are listed below.)

Remember that ordinary in-person discussion habits can become problematic when translated to VC. While in-person discussions often rely on simultaneous and affirmative small comments ("Yes," "I see," "go on"), these mid-sentence responses from a listener to a speaker — for instance, from you as a faculty member to a student speaking at a distant site — can come across as stronger interruptions in a VC. Emphasize the use of visual rather than verbal cues to students (nodding, positioning yourself in front of the camera to face speakers directly, and so on.)

Be especially mindful of the distant site(s). Look at the videoconferencing camera when talking to people at other sites; they will see you talking to them. While taking questions or answers, try to take as many from the distant site(s) as from your local one. Depending on the system and connection, you may want to repeat questions or comments offered by students at one site so as to be sure those at the other site(s) heard and understood. Keep in mind the entire room may not be visible by the videoconferencing camera; if necessary, you may want to announce when participants are entering or leaving the room.

Additional Classroom Management Resources

AT&T Videoconferencing for Learning: www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/vidconf

Activities

Successful integration of activities conducive to the VC environment and appropriate to your learning objectives requires a return to the careful course planning addressed earlier. To challenge yourself and your students, consider which activities — besides a discussion led by you, and perhaps guided by questions — would engage your students and deepen their learning. You might find several types of class interaction helpful in designing and developing specific activities:

  1. Team projects or assignments involving students across multiple sites (e.g., portfolios, visual essays, annotated bibliographies, and note-sharing).
  2. Research and reporting/presentation projects or assignments that capitalize on the different local experiences of students at different sites (e.g., field trip or site visit reports, local case studies of shared topics, etc.).
  3. Group discussions orchestrated to involve students from across multiple sites (e.g., skits, debates, role-playing, and problem-solving).

Here is a more straightforward listing of many of these activities:

  • Field trips and site visit reports
  • Discussions and debates
  • Role-playing and skits
  • Wikis (e.g., for shared class notes and group annotations of texts)
  • Collaborative spaces (e.g., Second Life and virtual museums)
  • Experiments and investigations
  • Individual and group presentations
  • Q&A periods
  • Brainstorming
  • Sketchbooks and art activities
  • Group problem-solving
  • Story boards, organizational charts, or outlines
  • Writing assignments and journal activities

Additional Activities Resources

A Teacher's Guide to Videoconferencing (Northwest Regional Education Laboratory): www.netc.org/digitalbridges/teachersguide/interaction.html

Assessing Student Performance

Among the most important aspects of assessing student performance in a VC environment is clarifying your expectations and sharing with students the guidelines by which they will be assessed. Just as "attendance and class participation/discussion" is the type of category that should be fleshed out in the grading breakdown of a traditional in-person course, in a VC course, you should specify as concretely as possible your criteria for evaluating student performance. During your pre-semester planning, while identifying your learning objectives and designing your strategies for teaching interactively in the VC environment, you should consider how to assess the performance of students engaged in the activities you have crafted.

Two challenges inherent to VC courses are assessing student interactivity and group/collaborative performance. Consider the activities and tasks you have designed for the course as a basis for determining individual student accomplishment. For instance, if you have structured your course around several group or collaborative projects such as research papers presented to the class, you could break out an overall assessment for collaboration by identifying individual students' level of quality for specific attributes of collaboration such as conceptualization, research, writing, and presentation.

You may find it helpful to create a grading rubric. For discussion and interaction, in particular, using a rubric after individual sessions can enable you to track student performance more accurately than is possible after several weeks have passed or at the end of the term. Rubrics orient several elements related to student performance and a scale of quality with those elements along two axes. For example, in terms of student interaction, you might include elements such as rapport with other students, quality of VC session interaction (e.g., discussion), group project participation, and interaction with the technical environment. For each of these elements, you could then assign letter grades or points (e.g., 1-4 or 1-5) to signify performance.

Additional Resources on Assessing Student Performance

A Teacher's Guide to Videoconferencing (Northwest Regional Education Laboratory): www.netc.org/digitalbridges/teachersguide/assessment.html

Evaluating Teaching and Courses

The evaluation of NYU courses and teaching begins with the standard instruments provided by schools and, in some cases, departments, to faculty members. These instruments are typically provided at the end of each semester in order to generate a summative assessment of the quality of the course and instruction. Some schools and departments also regularly provide opportunities for mid-term and/or more formative evaluation. Many faculty members find it valuable to generate their own additional instruments, either as supplementary mid-term or end-of-term evaluations, frequently qualitative and tailored to their own course. Others develop a series of evaluative materials to be combined with those of the school or department that provide feedback about student learning and the effectiveness of teaching strategies and technologies through the term in which a given course is offered.

For courses employing videoconferencing, teaching and course evaluation combine the robust formative and summative instruments used within in-person courses, as well as teaching strategies developed to capitalize specifically on VC capabilities. Asking students to respond to simple questions about what is or is not working in the class, or which lessons have or have not been easy to understand, can provide extremely useful feedback, particularly for those who have not used VC in the past. Furthermore, this exercise can be done early in a semester and repeated, targeting specific teaching strategies or group activities.

For more detailed feedback, you may consider adding questions that directly address VC teaching and course conduct to student responses solicited by school and departmental instruments. Here, adapted and expanded from www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/vidconf/eval.html, are sample questions:

  1. What were the learning objectives that guided the course? Were those objectives reached?
  2. Did the uses of VC technology enhance the specific learning objectives and curricular content?
  3. Were the expectations and guidelines for the use of the VC environment clearly communicated?
  4. Did the instructor use the technology to teach in a way that would not have been possible in an in-person course? If so, how?
  5. Was the use of the VC environment technically efficient? Were audio and video signals clear and consistent?
  6. What did you find most helpful (to your learning) about the use of VC technology? Of other technologies?
  7. What did you find least helpful (to your learning) about the use of VC technology? Of other technologies?
  8. Were the use of other media technologies and materials helpful to your learning? How?
  9. Did non-VC course activities (e.g., BlackBoard discussions, e-mail, one-on-one conferencing, office hours, online collaborations) complement and support your learning?
  10. If you could change one thing to improve the use of VC technology in this course, what would it be?
  11. How did the VC experience compare to that of an on-site, in-person classroom experience?
  12. How effective were the responses to technical failures or inconsistencies? While these examples have been cast in the past tense, as might be used at the end of a VC course, similar questions might be posed in the midst of a course in order to help you determine how successfully the course is progressing or how individual sessions are conducted.

Ideally, evaluation should be an ongoing process of feedback and improvement for faculty and their teaching. Coordinating school and departmental instruments with your own devices, targeted to address your course, can yield continuing feedback that will enable you to adapt to your students' needs and your new technical environment. A further option is to work with a consultant, such as those available through NYU's Center for Teaching Excellence, to spend 15-20 minutes of one of your VC sessions conducting a small group analysis with a subset of your students across multiple sites to discuss and analyze the course and your teaching. CTE staff will then report back to you with recommendations for improvement.

Additional Resources on the Evaluation of Teaching and Courses

Ongoing Support

Training and support programs and services for faculty using VC are available through NYU Information Technology Services (ITS) and the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE). Please consult the following websites for additional information:

Page last reviewed: August 27, 2009