Personal Blogs

When we first started using online tutorials (Elluminate), advice was to avoid the use of webcams because the quality was not good enough.  However, I recently saw an OU document recommending the use of webcams by the tutor and I have been switching it on recently.  Student response seems to be quite favourable with comments like "It is good to put a face to the name and voice", which slightly surprised me as most of the time I focus on the whiteboard, slides and chat.  However, if it makes a difference to how students feel about the experience, I am very happy to have my webcam on.

My first experience of OU Live today (an E301 tutorial).  Overall, it seemed quite similar to Elluminate but more people seemed to have problems with sound quality.  However, this might have been chance.

I had my first problem accessing Elluminate for some time yesterday.  I eventually solved it by using internet explorer rather than Firefox but it is strange this should have happened when it worked fine on Wednesday.

I did a session on Elluminate for E301 on Sunday.  I had a lot of positive feedback on this.  The session perhaps seemed quite dynamic because it was so well attended.

Again, there was quite a mixture of students who have attended Elluminate before and those for whom it is new.  This provides me with a dilemma in terms of how simple I keep the structure of the session.  I decided not to use breakout rooms because I thought they might intimidate the newcomers if some people seemed so much more at ease.

Would any of the students who attended like to add their perspectives?

I have had a couple of Elluminate meetings recently with new students from my E852 groups.

It has seemed to me that it is difficult to encourage deep thought on Elluminate and the more exploratory talk (Mercer 2000) does not really occur.  One reason for this is that wait time in Elluminate seems very awkward - much more than in face to face student where it is possible to see whether students are thinking or just completely stumped. 

I put these thoughts to one of the groups at the end of the session and there was quite an interesting response with one saying that my view was the result of being a man.  This comment seemed to resonate with the other (all were female) students in the session.   Perhaps this relates to what Rovai (2001: 41) calls “socio-emotional messages” and they feel that the sense of belonging is more important than the content.

This seems reasonable as students can really theorise and reflect on complex issues in the asynchronous forums but Elluminate helps them to feel part of the course.

Mercer, N. (2000) Words and Minds: how we use language to think together. London: Routledge.
Rovai, A.P. (2001) “Building classroom community at a distance: a case study” Education Technology Research and Development, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2001, pp. 33–48

A new L185 has recently started.  I did the first Elluminate session with one of the groups a couple of days ago.  It seemed to work reasonably well although there were some problems with loss of sound.

Would any of the participants care to comment on how they felt about it?

There was a Languages staff development day in Cardiff last Saturday.

It was interesting to meet people teaching different languages.  There was a strong feeling of teachers of Welsh that they were doing something important in terms of maintaining national identity.

It is clear that Elluminate is being widely used and is seen as having great potential but I wonder how long students need to get used to it.

I gave a brief presentation on plagiarism issues in EAP.