Two technologies that can be useful
to educators and learners participating in distance learning programs are webinars
and Vyew, a website that facilitates online collaboration and web conferencing.
Webinars are lectures, seminars or
meetings that are conducted online in real time and recorded for reuse. Webinars
enable interactive conferencing. Their use within education is becoming popular
especially in distance learning. Webinars offer a number of opportunities for
teaching and learning. They support remote teaching sessions and facilitate group
or individual activity (Jisc Digital Media,2013).Professors can use webinars to
host lectures by guest professors or to cover various topics. Learners can use webinars
to help them get more information about topics relevant to their area of study,
to learn research and academic writing skills. I believe that this digital tool
can be used to support adult learners in their studies.
The other online tool I chose
was Vyew. Vyew is a website that allows users to “host live conferences and
work collaboratively on content asynchronously over time, any time” (www.vyew.com).
This tool is free and it gives users opportunities to collaborate through
different mediums. It has the ability to integrate files, pictures and videos
etc (pretty terrific!). I think that this ability makes Vyew an attractive
collaboration tool. There are many other attractive features which give this
tool potential to enhance adult learning.
For more information visit: http://www.vyew.com
References:
Jisc Digital
Media, (2013). Webinars in education. Retrieved from http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/webinars-in-education
Vyew (2013). Retrieved from http://www.vyew.com
Esther,
ReplyDeleteI too think that webinars are a great tool to use. I am a visual learning and webinars could be very useful for a learning like me.
Vyew.com looks like an interesting tool for both learners and educators. For the learner it offers a way to share any type of information and to network via contextual discussion forums, video conferencing, white boarding and voice over IP. For the educator it is a ready made collaboration platform that allows tracking and an activity log to monitor student participation.
ReplyDeleteI have always found online collaboration difficult. It seems one or two people do all the work. Perhaps with this resource it would be easier to get a larger group to participate. It will also indicate who is contributing and who is not with the activity log.
I like the the sound of Vyew. A platform for collaboration (especially a free one!) is wonderful for learners to work together on projects and brainstorm ideas. Definitely need to investigate.
ReplyDeleteI used Vyew in my last course and I will definitely use it again. The benefits I saw for adult students was that each could log in at different times and create their own comments or upload working documents.
ReplyDeleteThe challenge I found was that the way the website uploaded documents was for each page to have a different Vyew page. Therefore if you uploaded a 10 page document, then you suddenly had 10 more Vyew pages to wade through. I would have preferred to have a document kept all together on one Vyew page.
In my practice, I would recommend this as one of many collaboration tools to consider for group projects. There are always changes with online program applications and perhaps in the future the challenge I encountered will have been fixed. Learners however are likely to find other challenges. No tool is perfect, that is why learners and educators need to be familiar with the program at the outset.