EdViCon Kick-Off Meeting – March 10 2022

Motivated by the COVID-19 restrictions when higher educational institutions’ educators and students were meeting in hybrid modalities and where an educator was in a classroom with some students and the rest are attending from home. In some cases, all attend from home. The software video conferencing systems alone have not been sufficient to communicate the teachers’ writing on a board, presentation slides, the gesture and posture, and engage students in groups or individually with differentiated or engaging activities. Additional online applications and accessories are used along with video conferencing systems for sending the information interfaces a student gets in a face-to-face classroom. For the educators, managing multiple devices and acting in front of the camera to provide a good experience for the viewers is different from face-to-face interaction. The suitable solutions are highly context-dependent but the use-case scenarios in terms of purpose and pedagogical design are similar. The activities involving lectures, student presentations, group-formation and group work, live quizzes, peer-group assessment, and collaborative design and facilitation are some of the activities that require integration of video-conferencing functionalities and various web-based software. The digital capabilities in the online teaching context involve even the use of camera setup, light settings, body language, eye contact, and other digital and non-digital tools - depending on the field of study. Against this scenario, in the new normal educational environment, and understanding the diverse classroom environment (i.e. lecture gallery, design studio, science lab, court-like law classes, etc.),  the project aims to make a portable video-conferencing toolkit, a list of online application to engage students, and a set of social norms as good practices necessary to uphold the quality of teaching. The definition of portable video conferencing in this project includes but not limited to ‘mobile video conferencing,’ but additional hardware including wireless speakers and microphones, separate webcam, pen tablets to substitute whiteboard, or streaming separate camera views for the teacher and whiteboard/blackboard, etc.

The project involves an international partnership on developing an innovative video conferencing and setting up a standard of excellence in higher education in using portable video conferencing and other online tools for engaging students with defining the complexities and diversities of teaching styles and learning preferences that involve technological, social, behavioural, and other temporal factors responsible for video-conferencing mediated teaching and learning.  The online training modules and training framework will become training resources for the faculty training programs, which will not be limited to the participating institutions only.

The developments pursue in the transnational clusters of digital learning technologies for higher education impact all educational programs of HE with priority given to STEM and teacher education programs.