by John Trump, Wake Forest School of Law
Everybody is up front, and you literally have eye contact with each of the students. Wake Forest has small sections, but if you’ve got 40 students, well, that’s still 40 students. “The gap — the distance between the podium in a regular classroom and that row of students’ chairs — can be thousands of miles. When you are sitting there at that computer screen, you are face to face.” This is useful for the teacher, who can gain insight into whether students are comprehending the material or, conversely, signal the need to elucidate. If a student speaks up or poses a question, his face becomes predominant on the screen. “For me, and I think for my colleagues, too, seeing a student’s face — seeing the students’ faces — you can get a much better sense of whether they’re understanding or not.” Said one student evaluation: “I think this has been the most rewarding class that I have taken at Wake Forest. I had an opportunity to work with each student one on one in a setting that permitted us to talk openly… Most importantly, though, I feel like this venue is in many ways more intimate than a typical classroom setting. … In this setting, we could see and hear the professor and the other students in the same way we do in a traditional classroom setting. …In my opinion, participating in the webinar discourages students from surfing the Internet, playing games and Facebooking, which is rampant and distracting in regular classes.”
http://news.law.wfu.edu/2011/10/virtual-courses-make-professors-brokers-of-learning/
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