Online Seminars and Conferencing
Online discussions are asynchronous (not existing or occurring at the same time) and online seminars and conferencing are synchronous (happening at the same time, live). There will be more on this later in the course.
Online conferences of this kind bring together groups of students, either in peer groups or with the tutor in a guided or taught session. While online discussions are useful for allowing students to work through topics over time, online conferences provide a dynamic way to meet together and share experience.
Conferencing tools
Web conferencing apps usually include a range of features useful for meetings and online seminars:
- audio
- video
- whiteboard/drawing space
- desktop/application sharing
- polling
- chat
- breakout rooms
Web conferencing is increasingly used in higher education, especially for postgraduate and distance learning courses as a way to move the face-to-face seminar experience into the online environment.
Zoom has quickly become to the go-to tool for conferencing, meetings and video calls because it's easy to use, quick to set up and reliable. One downside is that the free version limits scheduled calls to 40 minutes. Your institution might have a site licence.
MS Teams meetings as discussed earlier, provides an online meeting space as part of the Office 365 suite.
Blackboard Collaborate is another popular choice for online meetings and seminars. It was created for e-learning as part of the Blackboard learning environment but is available as a separate app. If your institution uses Collaborate, you may find it available to use in your courses.
Google Meet is another widely used system, free as part of the Google Workspace suite of tools.
Adobe Connect is yet another popular system, which, like Blackboard Collaborate, your institution might use for online seminars and collaboration.
There are lots of other tools available:
Check with your [E-Learning or IT department] to find out your options for online conferencing.
