1) Teaching in a web conferencing classroom presents unique challenges and demands confidence, competence, new strategies, and resilience from instructors. Instructors feel it is a demanding environment where they cannot see their students and challenges arise. 2) There is reluctance from some instructors to teach in a virtual classroom. Supports are needed to enhance instructors' experience, including discussion of practice, barriers, limits, collaboration, understanding student and instructor perspectives, and use of evidence. 3) Resources and strategies exist to help instructors, such as workshop materials, webinars, and literature on facilitating effectively in virtual classrooms and using strategies for the web conferencing format. Supporting instructors can help inspire

1. Enhancing the experience of
teaching in the web conferencing
classroom
Sarah Cornelius
School of Education
ELESIG Scotland, St Andrews 23 November 2015

2. Competence &
Confidence
Cognition &
Multimodality
Strategies &
Experience
Technology Media
Teaching
Challenges
of teaching
and learning
with web
conferencing
from Cornelius and Neumann, 2012
What do we know?

3. What do we know?
• Needs confidence and competence
– Demanding environment (Cornelius, 2014)
• Needs new/adapted strategies
– “Teaching with a blindfold on” (Cornelius et al. 2014)
• Needs resilience
– ”As soon as you get the hang of it it throws a new
challenge at you”
• There is reluctance and resistance
– “I’d rather do two Saturday workshops than one
virtual classroom session”

4. Enhancing staff experience
Discussion
-of practice
-of barriers
-of limits
To support
To inspire
Collaboration
-for learning
-for design
-for delivery
Understanding
-as learners
-of learners
Evidence
-to inspire
-to support
-for development

5. Sources and resources
ALT workshop resources
http://archive.alt.ac.uk/conference/altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/
28046.html
Teaching and Learning Conversation (Webinar, MMU)
Spring 2016
Cornelius (2014) Facilitating in a demanding
environment: experiences of teaching in virtual
classrooms using web conferencing. BJET 45(2) 260-
271
Cornelius, Gordon and Schyma (2014) Live online
learning: strategies for the web conferencing
classroom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
s.cornelius@abdn.ac.uk @sarahcornelius
University of Aberdeen © 2015
Enhancing the experience of teaching in the web conferencing classroom by Sarah Cornelius
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