You can do this yourself, with three people (though a tech person or two is helpful to make sure the lab stuff is working!), a couple of webcams, and a few computers. No need for fancy technology.
Two years ago, I wanted to figure out how to broadcast a Program for Online Teaching on-campus workshop and have online people participate too. My colleague Laura Paciorek was enthusiastic. Of course, we wanted to do it for free and on our own. I wanted a camera in the lab, so people online could see both the presenter and the people in the lab. At first we borrowed a flash-memory video camera from Media Services, but it was tricky to connect into the computer so we switched to a webcam.
The energy came from Laura, who took on the lab end. I became the facilitator online, in an Elluminate room. We did it a few times, with varying degrees of success, and as it became more complicated Laura felt we needed to document what we were doing, which we did here in this web page. We weren’t sure what to call what we were doing, but it was simultaneous and people were learning, so we called it Simulearn.
At about the same time, I attended an online sesson at the High Tech High School in San Marcos, and saw that they were doing the same thing, but with a camera at the back also so people could see the audience, and people on webcams at home. So we added that. Then we needed another person at the back of the lab on that camera, so we asked for another POT volunteer to man the computer at the back of the room. (Thanks, Lyle!)
Then Laura felt that presenters needed to be more prepared for what we were doing, since they needed to be aware of the online participants, use a microphone, and answer questions arising from the chat. So Laura made an excellent tutorial:
Some of this record-keeping was in case Laura or I missed a session, but I continued to get confused about how we were setting it up, since I was never actually in the lab location. So yesterday I got into Gliffy and created this graphic. Laura says it’s OK.
Hi Lisa – I was interested in this post of yours as it reminded me of my BEtreat experience with Etienne Wenger and Beverley Trayner in July. I think what they tried to do was one step further down the line than your experience, in that they tried to fully integrate the online participants into the face-to-face workshop. I blogged about it here – http://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/integrating-online-and-face-to-face-participation-in-a-community-of-practice/ I think we will defnitely being seeing more of this in the years to come – but the pedagogy is not easy to handle – if in fact one does handle pedagogy 🙂
Jenny
Thanks for sharing this, Jenny! The laptop idea is wonderful, and likely easier than the webcams, though the college’s laptops aren’t really up to it. I agree with your analysis of “something missing”, though our online participants in particular are grateful, since most of them teach elsewhere and can’t get to campus. Our gap is in the “hands-on” aspect, because they do stuff on the computers in the lab. I can usually led the online participants wherever they need to go, though. I do think it’s an advantage that our First Friday sessions are only an hour long, preventing “distance fatigue”. 🙂