Moving Past Distance Learning – Video Conferencing in Academia

Posted by KBZ Blogging Team

Video conferencing technology in the academic setting is often presented as a tool used by teachers to remotely connect with students. While it is true that the capacity for facilitating distance learning is one of the key advantages of video conferencing, telepresence also has many other benefits to offer learning institutions.

Research

Universities and colleges have always performed a crucial role in moving scientific and social development forward through a focus on research. Telepresence increasingly serves as a bridge between colleagues separated by geography who are working on the same project together, facilitating a level of communication and collaboration not possible over email or the telephone. This is especially important for researchers working at smaller schools where access to the same level of resources found at larger urban campuses is simply not available. Connecting rural academics with better-endowed institutions levels the playing field for researchers investigating areas of interest that are heavily dependent on specific equipment or subject matter experts.

Administration

The benefits of video conferencing also extend to the administrative side of academia, where directors and department heads are often tasked with managing a dispersed workforce of professors, academic aides, and researchers who operate on individual project schedules. The ability to gather all department members together over a live telepresence feed in order to make key decisions about future spending and other important areas of discussion makes video conferencing a vital tool for maintaining a cohesive direction within an area of study. It also allows for the development of a sense of community and camaraderie amongst professionals who may only interact in person on a very occasional basis due to busy work schedules.

Interviews

A final area where the advantages of video conferencing become clear in an academic setting has to do with social research programs that involve the interviewing of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of subjects. In the past, faculty members would be forced to hire teams of local interns or grad students to perform on-site interviews across the country or around the world. With the advent of modern telepresence, researchers and professors can now conduct the same scope of interviews using a much smaller staff that is based on-campus.

Video conferencing is a flexible and versatile technological solution that is capable of addressing many of the communications challenges facing educators and researchers at a wide range of different institutions. Creative use of telepresence has helped to expand the reach of human inquiry in both the applied and human sciences, and it has also introduced important budgetary efficiencies at the practical and administrative level.

Benjamin Hunting
KBZ Communications Blogging Team