A two-screen approach to facilitate communication and collaboration in the context of distance education

Abstract

For the past decades, many academic institutions avoided, or tried to avoid physical travel in favour of Video Conferencing Systems (VCS). With VCS, the real-time two-way visual and verbal interaction of the traditional classroom could be simulated by technology – creating a virtual classroom whose boundaries are limited only by the extent of the video conferencing network. However, compared with real face-to-face conversation, research suggests that communication through conventional video conferencing tools is an artificial experience. VCS filter out and distort many of the often unconscious signals that are used in face-to-face interaction. These signals, such as body expression, posture, gaze, and eye contact are used to regulate, maintain and progress verbal and social interactions among participants. In addition, VCS generally support the communication aspects of the interactions only, neglecting the collaboration aspect. Collaboration in an educational context is determined by the teaching and learning material used in an interactive way. What is needed is an integration or convergence of the communication and collaboration aspects into one integrated system. The Educator Collaborator (EC) approach, proposed in this thesis, addresses this issue. With the use of questionnaires as instruments of measure, this project intends to explore and compare the degree of students’ perceived interaction and satisfaction in three different VCS settings, in favour of our proposed system.