How does your university adopt "Live Online Communication" in learning processes?

Christopher Kjær: At the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), staff and students have access to the web-conference system Adobe Connect Pro directly from our Blackboard Learn LMS. All students can use the web-conference system whenever they find it suitable with respect to their learning activities, e.g. for group work. Our teachers use the system in different ways, depending on the teaching objectives, learning activities, and processes they want to support.


At SDU, we are still in an initial phase regarding the use of web-conference systems, but it is now possible to distinguish between a teacher and learner-centered approach and to understand how learning processes are supported by "live, online communication".

The teacher-centered approaches are typically expressed in two ways. Some teachers conduct parallel sessions using Adobe Connect, so students distributed in Europe can attend classes conducted on campus. The learning activities in this setup vary from low to high with respect to student activity and levels of learning. Low student activity is, in this case, when students typically just follow a lecture with a minimum of interaction with the other students and the teacher.

The other variety is similar, but is supplemented with learning activities fostering more online student activity and thereby higher levels of learning in the virtual classroom. These activities are often represented by student presentations, collaborative problem solving on the whiteboard, and subject-matter dialogs involving campus-based and online students.

In classes for about ten to thirty students, the teacher just logs into Adobe Connect and places a speakerphone in the classroom so sound can be transmitted live to the online students and vice versa. The online students can then follow the activities on the teacher's laptop and "feel" the classroom atmosphere via the teacher's webcam.

In addition, we have one teacher who also logs in to Adobe Connect via an interactive whiteboard, so he can shuffle between using this whiteboard and his PowerPoint. This setup enables online students to follow and contribute to campus-based classroom activities where PowerPoint presentations and a whiteboard are used in combination. In addition, some teachers record their lessons, so students can use the recordings as podcasts.

The student-centered approach, which can be seen as yet another attempt by the teachers to increase the students' levels of learning and competence development, is based on different kinds of collaborative group work. Because web-based conference systems like Adobe Connect supports learning processes through argumentation and negotiating of meaning, students now have the possibility to work online with complicated learning tasks where asynchronous communication mediated by e.g. discussion forums, e-mails, blogs, and wikis is inadequate, especially when it comes to complicated decision making.


As mentioned, group work is set up in different ways depending on the teaching objectives and the level of competence development required in the actual course. But the learning processes that we try to support with live online communication are still based on argumentation and negotiating of meaning.

Firstly, group work in a language course is designed to take place as homework between lessons. The group work involves solving different tasks that will be part of the following lessons, and the live, online communication seems to facilitate joint knowledge construction. Secondly, live, online communication in Adobe Connect has made it possible for engineering students attending the course -œDigital Construction- to collaborate on problem solving with architecture students from another Danish university.


In this effort, live communication supports the students' competence development with respect to identifying and describing an interdisciplinary problem and understanding other disciplines in interdisciplinary group work. Finally, live, online communication supports learning processes that take place in one of our distance-learning courses where case-based learning in groups are a central part of the learning activities.

What results have your experiences shown? What do theses approaches facilitate, and what do they make more difficult?

Christopher Kjær: With respect to the teacher-centered approach, the experiences are relatively positive. The teachers emphasize that more interaction occurs in the lessons, and that the students who are situated outside campus are happy to have the possibility to participate in the lessons. Student presentations, discussions, and tasks mediated by Adobe Connect have also been highlighted as a positive element because the platform supports the relations between the students attending the course online and those on campus.



A challenge has been that both teachers and students have underestimated the level of the competences needed when one wants to use a live, online communication platform like Adobe Connect and all its possibilities to support different learning processes in a teaching situation. This becomes obvious if something suddenly goes wrong. Then a lack of trouble-shooting abilities becomes clear. Because some students are participating from a distance, more planning and planning ahead of time is necessary, which challenges the teachers.



Regarding the student-centered approach, the teacher from the language course referred to above emphasized that group work done in Adobe Connect (between lessons) has enhanced the discussions taking place in the lessons. This indicates that live, online communication seems to facilitate the students' collaboration with respect to problem solving, which in turn, according to the teacher, supports the students' level of increased abstraction.



With respect to the engineering students, live, online communication has played a key role in their collaborative group work with the architecture students. Questionnaires and interviews with the students have shown that live, online communication also facilitates the students' joint construction of knowledge, such as joint problem solving by mutual refinement and negotiation of alternatives through argumentation.

In the distance-learning course, it became clear that live, online communication in Adobe Connect was facilitating the group work, but also that it was a challenge for some of the students. Some students did not have access to fast Internet connections, and not all students had received adequate instruction in how to use the platform.

This usually occurred because of individual, local problems with their participating in the online course that should have introduced them to it. The reason for this was that the time zone around the polar circle required that some students attend online courses at night. In general, this emphasizes the fact that a basic introduction to Adobe Connect is a must when students are supposed to use this live, online communication system.


What is special about the case-based learning approach?

Christopher Kjær: It is possible to distinguish between different approaches to case-based learning. Often it is the teacher or curriculum designer who chooses an exemplary case that the students should analyze and work with from different perspectives. In the module Health Promotion, which is part of a Master's of Science in Circumpolar Health, group work took place between a series of live online lessons.


The group work can be characterized as case-based learning in the sense that the students bring in their own local cases, which were discussed from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in Adobe Connect. The online lessons provided the students with theoretical concepts that should enrich the case work in groups.

How has the mix in blended learning changed in the last few years, and how would you define the mix of the future?

Christopher Kjær: At the University of Southern Denmark, which is a campus-based university, the mix of blended learning has first and foremost changed in that more face-to-face instruction and learning activities are supported or blended with asynchronous web applications like discussion boards, online tests, and web 2.0 tools like wiki and blogs. However - and as indicated above - live, online communication on platforms like Adobe Connect Pro have added new dimensions to the possibilities of delivering blended learning.

As demonstrated, web conference systems provide new and powerful possibilities to support the synchronous parts of blended learning. They give students flexibility to meet and collaborate on group-work activities live online, which indeed is a new dimension at our university. Of course some students have used Skype, but now they are supported by their teachers, and the teachers are supported by the University's eLearning Unit. This means that the University as an organization is behind and supports ongoing implementation of live, online communication where it is relevant.

In addition, we have recently conducted many Master's defenses via Adobe Connect, which has also forced the teachers to use live, online communication in their teaching. So from my perspective, for our university, the mix in blended learning has changed in that the synchronous parts of blended learning are much better supported, and thus its use is increasing. Following this, I also expect that live, online communication mediated by systems like Adobe Connect, Illuminate, or Interwise will play a much more important role than one could ever imagine. Learning technologies and Internet connection simply get better, which paves the way - in combination with mobile technologies - to bring blended learning to new heights.