Visual Communication and Collaboration: Instructional videos

Visual communication introduces a series of challenges compared to ordinary classroom teaching. There are both technical and pedagogical challenges which should be considered seriously. By use of visual communication a lot of technical gadgets and peripherals are introduced, which evidently may give new ideas how to create variation in ordinary classroom teaching. These new technical solutions also give new possibilities to offer distance training across regions, countries and continents. However, there is a substantial danger that introduction of new technology in education may, in fact, lead to less quality of teaching unless basic rules are followed.

As a principal rule we claim that is of cruical importance to achieve a natural balance between the human relations and the technology. On video, a lecturer never becomes a better teacher than he or she is in normal classroom teaching. In fact, errors and lack of overview of the technology become more visible in these new settings.

A number of short instructional videos have been produced to help visualizing the teaching process by use of visual communication technologies. There are both pedagogical videos (presentation techniques) as well as more technical oriented videos to avoid the most common pitfalls and thumbling stones. It is recommended that the user has got access to a video conferencing system which is installed and set up properly, and that the equipment might be connected to an ISDN or IP network.

Video Categories

• Basic use of visual communication
• Presentation techniques
• Optimalization of visual communication
• Technology and infrastructure