Techno-pedagogical considerations to integrate videoconferencing into educational activities (I)

By Teresa Romeu, Juliana Raffaghelli and Marc Romero

Digital technologies improve and facilitate our day-to-day and professional tasks. The situation of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the intensification of the use of online communication tools, enhancing an increase in the digitisation of the population and, with it, the need to be trained to optimise more and better the possibilities offered by these communication tools.

The revolution in forms of synchronous relationship and communication has come suddenly in the educational context. The need to continue maintaining contact and social interaction between school-family has led to new types of learning for the teacher and the students. However, the precipitation and spontaneityto have a reproduction ready between a classroom and an online class should not be the solution and a prior techno-pedagogical reflection would be necessary before integrating online educational activities. We provide you with some recommendations.

Aspects to consider when organising a video conference for educational purposes

When making a videoconference, the analog language is lost, that is, the facial and gestural language that forms an important part of communication. Also, student participation and dialogue with the teacher is more complex if it is done with a large group.

Not all students have the necessary tools or skills to be able to properly follow a video conference. We must also consider the aspects related to the privacy and security of this type of tools (capture of personal data, possible hacking in videoconferencing …)

And it is important to adapt the work and teaching to the situation by opting for asynchronous processes for the realisation of more intense activities and synchronous activities for more operational and limited activities such as reaching agreements, concrete aspects, collecting proposals; so we recommend not doing sessions for more than an hour.

Table of Video Conferencing Tools

Considering these previous aspects and in order to collect and synthesise the characteristics of the main videoconferencing tools that can be used for educational purposes, we have developed this table specifying the functionalities, educational possibilities, advantages and disadvantages of videoconferencing tools.

You can consult the table here.