1. Introduction

Videoconferences have been used for meeting purposes for the last three decades. During recent years the technical development has resulted in a substantial improved technical quality of visual communication. It has become more and more common to use this media as an educational tool. In distance learning it is used for lecturing, often accompanied by traditional e-learning materials. Videoconferences are then regarded as a component of blended learning, or, recently, so-called extended blended learning.

Figure 1 Here we see a video lecture with three locations present: On the left monitor we see the lecturer in the upper picture, a group of students in the lower left picture, and a single student on the lower right picture. In addition, the lecturer has got a monitor with self view to the right.

Video conferencing is a method that might be used for delivering distance education courses to several remote endpoints. It offers two-way real time communication between the teacher and student that might be separated by large geographical distances. Video conference technology facilitates and supports the educational process by offering distance educational systems that might be highly interactive. It is becoming a highly valuable tool in the delivery and training of education to widely dispersed groups of students. One of the great benefits of distance education is that you can reach remote locations in instances where the instructor cannot travel to the students' site.

Video conferencing allows two or more distant groups to communicate face-to-face in real time by using a combination of audio and video equipment. Video conferencing brings people in one remote location together with those in another - whether it be from a university to a company, from a high school to a library, or between nations.

To let you have some ideas on how visual communication might be used in a pedagogical relation; please have a look at the following video clips. The video should open in Windows Media Player when you click on the picture below.